The Factors of Race &

Nation in Marxist Theory

Amadeo Bordiga
Originally published under the title “I fattori di razza e nazione nella
teoria marxista” in issues 16-20 of Il Programma Comunista, September-
November 1953. Translated in December 2013-January 2014 from the
Spanish translation of the Partido Comunista Internacional.

Contents

Contents 1
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

I Reproduction of the Species and Productive Econ-

omy, Inseparable Aspects of the Material Foun-
dation of the Historical Process 13
1 Labor and Sex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3 Individual and Species . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
5 Biological Heredity and Social Tradition . . . . . . 25
6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
7 Natural Factors and Historical Development . . . . 29
8 Prehistory and Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
9 Social Labor and Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
10 Economic Base and Superstructure . . . . . . . . . 37
11 Stalin and Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
12 The Idealist Theory of National Language . . . . . 49

1
 13 References and Distortions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
14 Personal and Economic Dependence . . . . . . . . 58

II The Marxist Interpretation of the Political Strug-

gle and of the Impact of the National Factor in
the Historic Modes of Production 64
1 From Race to Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
2 The Emergence of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3 States Without Nationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
4 The Hellenic Nation and Culture . . . . . . . . . . 73
5 The Roman Nation and Force . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6 The Decline of Nationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
7 The Social Structures of the German Barbarians . . . 84
8 Feudal Society as Non-national Organization . . . . 88
9 The Bases of the Modern Revolution . . . . . . . . 93

III The Movement of the Modern Proletariat and

the Struggles for the Creation and Self-Determination
of Nations 95
1 Feudal Obstacles to the Emergence of Modern Nations 96
2 Feudal Localism and Universal Church . . . . . . . 99
3 Universalism and Political Centralism . . . . . . . . 102
4 The Revolutionary Demands of the National Bour-
geoisie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
5 The Iridescent Superstructures of the Capitalist Rev-
olution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
6 The Proletariat Makes Its Appearance on the His-
torical Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
7 The Proletarian Struggle and the National Sphere . . 119
8 The Proletarian Strategy in Europe in 1848 . . . . . 123

2
9 Revolutionary Retreat and the Workers Movement . 127
10 National Struggles after 1848 . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
11 The Polish Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
12 The International and the Question of Nationalities 139
13 The Slavs and Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
14 The Wars of 1866 and 1870 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
15 The Commune and the New Cycle . . . . . . . . . 153
16 The Imperialist Epoch and Irredentist Residues . . . 155
17 A Formula for Trieste Offered to the “Contingentists” 159
18 The European Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

3
Introduction
The Impotence of the Banal “Denialist”
Position
1 Races, Nations or Classes?
The method of the Italian and international communist left has never
had anything in common with the false dogmatic and sectarian ex-
tremism that seeks to abolish the forces that operate in the real process
of history with empty verbal and literary denials.
In a recent article in our “Thread of Time” series (“Racial Pres-
sure of the Peasantry, Class Pressure of the Peoples of Color”, Il Pro-
gramma Comunista, no. 14, August 24, 1953), which contains a series
of reflections on the national-colonial and agrarian questions—and
therefore concerning the principal contemporary social questions in
which important forces are involved, forces that are not limited to
industrial capital and the wage-earning proletariat—it was demon-
strated with documentary evidence that a perfectly orthodox and rad-
ical revolutionary Marxism acknowledges the current significance of
these factors and the corresponding need for an adequate class and
party policy to address them; and this was undertaken not exclusively
with quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but also with the found-
ing documentation, from the years 1920-1926, of the left opposition
in the International and the Communist Party of Italy which during
that period was a member of the International.
Only in the fatuous insinuations of the adversaries of the left, who
have in the meantime followed the path of opportunism and are to-
day shockingly floundering in the repudiation of class-based Marxism
and in counterrevolutionary politics, has the left been complicit in the
absolutist and metaphysical error according to which the communist
party must concern itself only with the duel between the pure forces

4
of modern capital and the wage workers, from which duel the pro-
letarian revolution will arise, denying and ignoring the influence on
the social struggle of any other class or any other factor. In our recent
work involving the reconstruction of the basics of Marxist economics
and of the Marxist revolutionary program we have fully proven that
this pure “phase” does not actually exist in any country, not even in
the most highly industrialized nations where the political rule of the
bourgeoisie has been most deeply rooted, such as England, France and
the United States; to the contrary, this “phase” cannot be verified any-
where, and its existence by no means constitutes a necessary precon-
dition for the revolutionary victory of the proletariat.
It is therefore plain foolishness to say that, since Marxism is the
theory of the modern class struggle between capitalists and workers,
and since communism is the movement that leads the struggle of the
proletariat, we have to deny any historical impact on the part of the
social forces of other classes, the peasants, for example, and racial and
national tendencies and movements, and that by correctly establish-
ing the basis of our activity we shall consider such elements to be su-
perfluous.

2
Historical materialism, presenting the course of prehistory in a new
and original way, has not only considered, studied and evaluated the
process of formation of families, groups, tribes, races and peoples up
to the formation of nations and political states, but has precisely ex-
plained these phenomena in the context of their connection with and
how they are conditioned by the development of the productive forces,
and as manifestations and confirmations of the theory of economic
determinism.
The family and the horde are forms that we undoubtedly also
encounter among the animal species, and it is often said that even

5
the most highly evolved animal families and herds, while they may
begin to display examples of collective organization for certain pur-
poses of defense and self-preservation and even for the gathering and
storage of food, still do not display productive activity, which distin-
guishes man, even the most primitive man. It would be more correct
to say that what distinguishes the human species is not knowledge
or thought or some particle of divine light, but the ability to pro-
duce not only objects of consumption but also objects devoted to
subsequent acts of production, such as the first rudimentary tools for
hunting, fishing, gathering fruit, and, later, for agricultural and craft
labor. This primordial need to organize the production of tools is
linked—and this characterizes the human species—with that of sub-
jecting the reproductive process to some kind of discipline and rules,
overcoming the accidental nature of the sexual relation with forms
that much more complex than those presented by the animal world.
It is especially in the classic work by Engels, to which we shall make
abundant references, that the inseparable connection, if not the iden-
tity, of the development of the institutions of the family and of pro-
duction is demonstrated.
Thus, in the Marxist view of the course of human history, before
social classes even appeared—our whole theoretical battle is aimed at
proving that these classes are not eternal; they had a beginning and
they will also have an end—the only possible explanation is provided,
on scientific and material bases, for the function of the clan, the tribe
and the race and of their ordering under increasingly more complex
forms due to the influence of the characteristics of the physical envi-
ronment and to the growth of the productive forces and of the tech-
nology at the disposal of the collectivity.

6
3
The historical factor of nationalities and of the great struggles for and
among them, displayed so variously throughout history, becomes de-
cisive with the appearance of the bourgeois and capitalist social form
by means of which this factor is extended over the entire earth, and
Marx in his time devoted the greatest attention, no less than he de-
voted to the processes of social economy, to the struggles and wars of
national consolidation.
With the doctrine and party of the proletariat already in existence
since 1848, Marx not only provided the theoretical explanation for
these struggles in accordance with economic determinism, but also
strove to establish the limits and the conditions of time and place for
supporting insurrections and wars for national independence.
By developing the great organized units of peoples and nations,
and by superimposing state forms and hierarchies on them and their
social dynamism that was differentiated by castes and classes, the racial
and national factors played diverse roles in the various historical epochs;
slavery, local chieftains, feudalism, capitalism. The importance of these
factors varied from one form to another, as we shall see in the sec-
ond part of our essay and as we have shown on so many occasions.
In the modern epoch, in which the transition from the feudal form,
from personal dependence and limited and local exchange, began and
spread throughout the world, to the bourgeois form of economic servi-
tude and the formation of the great unitary national markets, and
then to the world market, the consolidation of nationality accord-
ing to race, language, traditions and culture, and the demand that
Lenin summarized in his formula, “one nation, one state” (while he
explained that it was necessary to fight for this although he also said
that it was a bourgeois formula and not a proletarian and socialist
one), possess a fundamental force in the dynamic of history. What
Lenin had verified with regard to the pre-1914 era in eastern Europe

7
was true for Marx after 1848 in all of western Europe (except England)
and even in 1871, as everyone knows. And today it is true outside of
Europe, in vast areas of the inhabited world, although the process is
impelled and accelerated by the potential for economic exchange and
all sorts of other factors on a world scale. As a result, the problem of
what position must be taken with regard to the irresistible tendencies
of the “backward” peoples to engage in struggles for national inde-
pendence is of contemporary relevance.

4 Opportunism and the National Question

The dialectical core of the issue does not reside in equating an alliance
in the physical struggle for anti-feudal revolutionary goals between
bourgeois states and the working class and its party with a repudiation
of the doctrine and the politics of the class struggle, but in showing
that under the historical conditions and in the geographical regions
in which this alliance is necessary and unavoidable, the programmatic
theoretical and political critique of the goals and ideologies for which
the bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements fight should remain in-
tegral and should be pursued tirelessly.
In the third and final part of our essay we shall show how Marx, at
the same time that he energetically defends, for example, the cause of
Polish or Irish independence, never ceases not only to condemn, but
to utterly demolish and bury in ridicule the idealist conceptions of the
bourgeois and petty bourgeois authors concerning democratic justice
and the freedom of the peoples. Whereas for us the national market
and the centralized capitalist nation-state constitute stepping stones
to the international economy that will supersede the state and the
market, for the famous personalities that Marx ridicules—Mazzini,
Garibaldi, Kossuth, Sobieski, etc.—the democratic consolidation into
nation-states is an end-point that will terminate all social struggles,
and they want the homogeneous nation-state because in such a state

8
the employers will not appear as enemies or as elements that are for-
eign to the exploited workers. At this historical moment the front
lines are shifted, and the working class wages civil war against the state
of its own “fatherland”. The advent of this moment was hastened and
its conditions were being established by the process of the revolutions
and bourgeois national wars of consolidation in Europe (and today
in Asia and Africa as well): this is how to decipher this problem that,
while changing, never ceases to offer variable directions.

5
Opportunism, betrayal, backsliding, and counterrevolutionary and
philo-capitalist action on the part of today’s Stalinist false commu-
nists has a double impact on this terrain (no less than on the strictly
economic and social terrain of so-called domestic politics). They con-
tribute to the emergence of national democratic demands and values
with excessive open political alliances, even in the highly advanced
capitalist West where any plausible reason for engaging in such al-
liances was ruled out in 1871; but they also disseminated among the
masses the sacred respect for the patriotic national and popular ideol-
ogy identified with that of their bourgeois allies, and even court the
support of the champions of these policies, who were ferociously de-
nounced by Marx and Lenin in their time, while they pursue their
mission of extirpating all class sentiment in the workers who have the
misfortune of following them.
It would be stupid to offer as an extenuating circumstance for
the infamy of the parties that today claim to represent the workers,
and above all in Italy, under the false name of communists and social-
ists, the fact that they acknowledge as an admitted Marxist method,
the participation in revolutionary national alliances on the part of the
workers parties, on the condition that they should take place outside
the 20th century and outside of the historical-geographical bound-

9
aries of Europe. When, in the conflict that recently erupted in the
highly developed West (France, England, America, Italy, Germany,
Austria), the Russian state and all the parties of the former Com-
munist International then joined in the military alliance with all the
bourgeois states, when there was no Napoleon III or Nicholas II or
similar figures, first of all the lessons of Marx’s Address on behalf of
the First International to the Paris Commune of 1871 were directly
contravened, in which Marx denounced and ruled out forever any al-
liance with “national armies” because “the national governments are
one as against the proletariat”, and secondly Lenin’s theses on the war
of 1914 and the founding of the Third International were also con-
travened, in which it was established that, once the stage of gener-
alized imperialist wars had commenced, demands for democratic re-
form and national self-determination no longer had anything to do
with the policies of states, condemning all social-nationalist traitors,
from the Rhine to the Vistula.
A simple proposal to “reapply the terms” conceded to capitalism,
transferring 1871 and 1917 to 1939 and 1953, with an incalculable subse-
quent extension, cannot proceed very far without completely under-
mining the entire Marxist method of reading history, at the crucial
points in which its doctrinal force began to open up a breach in the
armies defending the past: the European 1848, and the Russian 1905.
Furthermore, such a proposal leads to the repudiation of all classical
economic and social analysis, by claiming to assimilate the recent fas-
cist totalitarianism with feudal remnants that still existed during that
period (and even non-fascist, when Poland was divided between Ger-
many and Russia!).
But the sentence of diametrical treason is also encountered in the
second aspect: the total and integral cancellation of that critique of
the “values” of bourgeois thought, which proclaim a classless world of
popular independence, free nationalities, and independent and peace-
ful fatherlands. Marx and Lenin, however, when they were forced to

10
reach some kind of agreement with the authors of this putrid concep-
tual framework, drove the struggle to liberate the working class from
the fetishes of the national fatherland and democracy proclaimed by
the big names of bourgeois radicalism to the highest point of viru-
lence, and were able to in fact break with them in the historical dy-
namic, and when the relation of forces permitted they crushed its
movement. Their successors today have inherited the function of the
priests of these fetishes and myths; now it is not a matter of a historical
pact that they will break later than they had foreseen, but of the total
submission to the demands of the capitalist bourgeoisie in order to
obtain the optimum of the regime that would allow them privileges
and power.
The thesis is interesting because it conforms to the demonstra-
tion, offered in “Dialogue with Stalin” and in other inquiries in the
field of economic science, that Russia today is a state that has com-
pleted the capitalist revolution, and that in its social marketplace there
is a place for the flags of nationality and fatherland, as well as the most
unbounded militarism.

6
It is a very serious mistake not to see, and indeed to deny, the fact that
in today’s world national and ethnic factors still have an impact and
exercise enormous influence, and that careful study of the limits in
time and space in which campaigns for national independence, linked
with social revolutions against pre-capitalist forms (Asiatic, slave and
feudal) still have the character of necessary preconditions for the tran-
sition to socialism—with the founding of nation-states of the modern
type (in India, China, Egypt, Persia, etc., for example)—is still rele-
vant.
Differentiating between these situations is difficult, on the one
hand because of the factor of xenophobia determined by the ruth-

11
less capitalist colonialism, and on the other due to the widespread dis-
semination throughout the world of productive resources that causes
commodities to reach the most distant markets; but on the world scale
the burning question posed in 1920 in the area of the former Russian
empire, that of offering political and armed support to the indepen-
dence movements of the peoples of the East, is by no means closed.
For example, to say that the relation between industrial capital
and the class of the wage workers is expressed in precisely the same
way in Belgium and Thailand, and that the praxis of their respective
struggles should be established without taking into account in either
of the two cases the factors of race or nationality, does not mean you
are an extremist, but it means in effect that you have understood noth-
ing of Marxism.
It is not by draining Marxism of all its depth and scope as well
as its harsh and uninviting complexity that one conquers the right to
refute, and one day to crush, despicable renegades.

12
 Part I

Reproduction of the Species and

Productive Economy,
Inseparable Aspects of the
Material Foundation of the
Historical Process

13
1 Labor and Sex
Historical materialism loses all its meaning wherever it consents to
the introduction of the allegedly individual nature of the sexual urge
as a factor that is alien to the domain of the social economy, which
would generate derivations and constructions of an extra-economic
order until it attains the most evanescent and spiritual levels.
A much greater mobilization of the scientific material would be
necessary, always starting from the highest degree of mistrust towards
the decadent and venal official science of the current period, if this
polemic were to be aimed only at the self-proclaimed total adversaries
of Marxism. As always, it is the currents that say that they accept some
parts of Marxism, and then address essential collective and human
problems claiming that they are beyond its purview, that concern us
the most in their capacities as counterrevolutionary factors.
It is clear that idealists and fideists, having established their views
upon the explanation of the natural hierarchy of values, tend to sit-
uate the problems of sex and love in a sphere and a level that is far
above the economy, which is vulgarly understood as the satisfaction
of the need to eat and related needs. If the element that elevates and
distinguishes the species homo sapiens from the other animals really
derives not from the physical effect of a long evolution in a complex
environment of material factors, but descends from the penetration
of a particle of an immaterial cosmic spirit, it is clear that in the repro-
duction of one being by another, of one thinking brain by another, we
would need a more noble relation that that of the everyday filling of
the stomach. If, even without depicting this personal spirit as imma-
terial, it is admitted that in the dynamic of human thought there is an
evident virtue and a force that pre-exists or exists outside the bounds
of matter, it is clear that the mechanism that substitutes the gener-
ated ego for the generative ego, with its own essential qualities, hy-
pothetically pre-existent to any contact with physical nature and all

14
cognition, must be sought in a more arcane domain.
For the dialectical materialist it is unforgivable to assume that the
economic structure, in whose forces and laws the explanation of the
political history of humanity is sought, embraces only the production
and consumption of the more or less wide range of goods that are
necessary to keep the individual alive; and that the material relations
between individuals are limited to this domain, and that the play of
forces that unite these innumerable isolated molecules composes the
norms, rules and laws of social reality; while a whole series of vital sat-
isfactions are left out of this construction; and for many dilettantes
these include the ones that extend from sex-appeal to aesthetic and
intellectual pleasures. This interpretation of Marxism is terribly false,
it is the worst kind of anti-Marxism that is currently popular, and be-
sides relapsing into an implicit but inexorable bourgeois idealism, it
also constitutes a return, with no less harmful consequences, to full-
blown individualism, which is another essential trait of reactionary
thought; and this makes both the biological as well as the psycholog-
ical individual central categories and standards of reference.
The material factor does not “generate” the superstructural fac-
tor (juridical, political, philosophical) by means of a process that takes
place within an individual, nor by way of a hereditary generative chain
of individuals, leaving the “comedies” of the economic base and its
cultural culmination to be taken care of later by a social process. The
base is a system of palpable physical factors that embraces all individu-
als and determines their behavior, even at an individual level, a system
that comes into existence when these individuals have formed a social
species, and the superstructure is a derivative of these conditions of
the base, determinable according to the study of these conditions and
subject to calculations on that basis, without concerning ourselves
with the thousands of particular behaviors and of their petty personal
variations.
The error that we are addressing is therefore an error of princi-

15
ple, which, by leading the examination of the causes of historical pro-
cesses towards ideal factors that are outside of physical nature, on the
one hand, and on the other by the leading role it grants to the ridicu-
lous Individual citizen, leaves dialectical materialism no field of oper-
ations, so that it is even rendered incapable of balancing the books at
a bakery or a delicatessen.

2
The position that denies the validity of Marxism on the terrain of
sex and reproduction along with all its rich derivations is ignorant of
the opposition between the bourgeois and communist conceptions
of the economy, and therefore turns its back on the powerful con-
quest achieved by Marx when he demolished the capitalist schools.
For the latter the economy is the totality of relations that are based
on the exchange between two individuals of objects that are mutually
useful for their self-preservation, and they include labor power among
these useful objects. From this they deduce that there never was and
never will be an economy without exchange, commodities and prop-
erty. For us, the economy includes the full range of activity engaged in
by the species, by the human group, that influences its relations with
the physical natural environment; economic determinism rules over
not only the epoch of private property but over the entire history of
the species.
All Marxists consider the following theses to be correct: private
property is not eternal; there was a time of primitive communism
when private property did not exist; and we are advancing towards
the era of social communism; the family is not eternal, much less the
monogamous family—it appeared very late and in a more advanced
era will have to disappear; the state is not eternal—it appears in a quite
advanced stage of “civilization” and will disappear along with the di-

16
vision of society into classes.
It is clear that none of these truths can be reconciled with a view
of historical praxis that is based on the dynamic of individuals and on
a concession, however minimal it may be, to their autonomy and ini-
tiative, their liberty, conscience, will and all other such trivialities. The
truths enumerated above are only demonstrable after having accepted
that the determining element is an exhaustive process of adaptation
and organization of the human collectives in the face of the difficul-
ties and obstacles of the time and place in which they live, resolving
not the thousands of millions of problems of adaptation faced by the
individuals, but that other perspective that tends towards a unitary
viewpoint, that of the prolonged adaptation of the species as a whole
to the demands imposed on it by external circumstances. This con-
clusion is unavoidable in view of the increase in the number of mem-
bers of the species, the toppling of the barriers that separate them
from each other, the dizzying multiplication of the available technical
means, which can only be managed by way of collective institutions
composed of innumerable individuals, etc.
For a primitive people one could very well suppose that sociol-
ogy is about how to get food, from the very moment when it was no
longer obtained by the powers of individual effort, as is the case with
animals; but public sanitation, obstetrics, eugenics and, tomorrow,
the annual birth quota, are also part of sociology.

3 Individual and Species

The individual self-preservation in which the mysterious principal
motor force of events is always sought is nothing but a derivative and
secondary manifestation of the self-preservation and development of
the species, independently of the traditional benefits conferred by a
natural or supernatural providence, the play of the instincts or of rea-

17
son; and this is all the more true for a social species and a society with
some highly developed and complex aspects.
It might appear to be too obvious to point out that everything
could very well be explained by individual self-preservation, as the
basis and motor force of all other phenomena, if the individual were
immortal. In order to be immortal he would have to be immutable,
exempt from aging, but it is precisely the nature of the living organism
and especially the animal organism, to undergo an unavoidable and
uninterrupted transformation from within itself of every one of its
cells, since it hosts within its body an impressive chain of movements,
circulation and metabolism. It is absurd to postulate an organism that
lives by continuously replacing the elements it has lost and remaining
self-identical, as if it were a crystal that, immersed in a solution of its
own chemically pure solid substance, diminishes or grows according
to a cyclic variation of temperatures or external pressures. Some have
even spoken of the life of the crystal (and today of the atom) since they
can be born, grow, shrink, disappear and even duplicate and multiply.
This might seem too banal to mention, but it is useful to reflect on
the fact that the fetishistic conviction held by many (even many who
pass themselves off as Marxists) regarding the primacy of the factor of
individual biology is nothing but an atavistic reflection of primeval
and crude beliefs concerning the immortality of the personal soul. In
no religion has the most vulgar bourgeois egoism, which displays a
fierce contempt for the life of the species and for compassion for the
species, been implanted more deeply than in those that claim that the
soul is immortal, and in this fantastic form considers the fate of the
subjective person to be more important than that of all the others.
It is unpleasant to meditate on the fact that the movement of our
poor carcass is only transitory, and as a substitute for the afterlife in-
tellectualoid illusions arise—and today, existentialist illusions— con-
cerning the distinctive stigma that every subject possesses, or believes
he possesses even when he sheepishly follows the fashionable trends,

18
and passively imitates all the other human puppets. It is at this point
that the hymn of praise is intoned for the ineffable virtues of the emo-
tions, of the will, of artistic exaltation, of cerebral ecstasis, which are
only attained within the individual unit—precisely where the truth
is the exact opposite.
Returning to the material way that events unfold right under our
noses, it is obvious that any complete, healthy and adult individual, in
the full possession of his faculties, can devote himself—we are refer-
ring to an economy of an elementary nature—to the production of
what he needs to consume on a daily basis. The instability of this sit-
uation, individual by individual, would soon lead to its termination
(and of the species if the latter were a senseless conglomeration of indi-
viduals connected with each other only by the principle of maximiza-
tion of personal gain at the expense of the others) if it were to lack the
flow of reproduction that characterizes an organic group, in which
individuals who just look out for themselves are rare, and in which
there are elderly persons who cannot work so hard, and very young
children who need to be fed so they can produce in the future. Any
economic cycle would be unthinkable, and we would not be able to
devise any economic equations, without introducing into the calcula-
tion these essential magnitudes: age, abilities, health. We would thus
have to elaborate the vulgar economic formula of a parthenogenic and
unisexual humanity. This cannot be verified, however. So we have to
introduce the sexual factor, since reproduction takes place by means
of two heterogeneous genders, and the hiatus in productive activity
necessitated by gestation and rearing have to be taken into account,
too. . .
Only after having addressed all these issues can we say we have
drawn up the conditional equations that totally describe the “base”,
the economic “infrastructure” of society, from which we shall deduce
(casting aside once and for all that puppet called the individual which
cannot perpetuate or renew itself, and which is less and less capable of

19
doing so as he proceeds along this great road) the whole infinite range
of the manifestations of the species which have only in this way been
rendered possible, right up to the greatest phenomena of thought.
In a recently-published article, a journalist (Yourgrau, in Johan-
nesburg), in his review of the theory of the general system of Berta-
lanffy, who sought to synthesize the principles of the two famous rival
systems, vitalism and mechanicism, while reluctantly admitting that
materialism is gaining ground in biology, recalls the following para-
dox which is not easy to confute: one rabbit alone is not a rabbit, only
two rabbits can be a rabbit. We see how the individual is expelled from
his last stronghold, that of Onan. It is therefore absurd to address eco-
nomics without dealing with the reproduction of the species, which
is how it was approached in the classical texts. If we turn to the Pref-
ace of The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State this
is how Engels approaches one of the basic pillars of Marxism:
“According to the materialistic conception, the determining fac-
tor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduc-
tion of the immediate essentials of life. This, again, is of a twofold
character. On the one side, the production of the means of existence,
of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary
for that production; on the other side, the production of human be-
ings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organiza-
tion under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a par-
ticular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the
stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on
the other.”
From its theoretical foundations, the materialist interpretation of
history organizes the data concerning the relative degree of develop-
ment of technology and productive labor and the data regarding the
“production of human beings” or the sphere of sexuality. The work-
ing class is the greatest productive force, according to Marx. And it is
even more important to know how the class that works reproduces,

20
studying how it produces and reproduces the mass of commodities,
wealth and capital. The classical dispossessed wage worker of antiq-
uity was not officially defined in Rome as a worker, but as a proletar-
ian. His characteristic function was not that of giving society and the
ruling classes the labor of its own body, but that of generating, with-
out controls or limits, in his rustic little apartment, the day laborers
of tomorrow.
The modern petty bourgeois, in his vacuity, thinks that the lat-
ter function would be much more pleasant for him than the former
function, which is much more bitter. But the petty bourgeois, who is
just as revolting and as philistine as the big bourgeois, necessarily faces
this function, too, with every kind of impotence.

4
Likewise, the first communities prepared for productive labor with
the rudimentary technology that was then available, and prepared to
serve the purposes of mating and reproduction, education and the
protection of the young. The two forms are in continuous connec-
tion and therefore the family in its diverse forms is also a relation of
production and changes as the conditions of the environment and the
available forces of production change.
In this essay we cannot recapitulate the entire story of the suc-
cessive stages of savagery and barbarism that the human race has tra-
versed, and which are characterized by their different ways of life and
kinship structures, and we refer the reader to the brilliant work of En-
gels.
After living in the trees feeding on fruit, man first became ac-
quainted with fishing and fire, and learned to navigate the coasts and
rivers so that the various tribes came into contact with one another.
Then came the hunt with the use of the first weapons, and in the

21
stage of barbarism, first the domestication of animals arose and then
agriculture, which signaled the transition from a nomadic to a seden-
tary lifestyle. The sexual forms did not yet include monogamy or even
polygamy; the latter was preceded by matriarchy, in which the mother
exercised moral and social dominance, and the group family in which
the men and the women of the same gens lived together in a fluid suc-
cession of pairing relationships as Morgan discovered in the Ameri-
can Indians who, even when they adopted the ways of the white man,
even when they had adopted monogamy, called their paternal uncles
“father”, and their aunt, “mother”. In these phratries, where no con-
stituted authority ruled, there was no division of property or of the
land, either.
One might consider that it is one of the traits of the higher an-
imals to display an embryonic organization for tending to and de-
fending their offspring, but this is due to instinct, and that it is only
the rational animal, however, man, that provides himself with orga-
nizations with economic purposes, while instinct remains dominant
in the sphere of the bonds of sex and family. If this were really true,
then the existence of intelligence, which is commonly admitted to be a
substitute for instinct and something that neutralizes instinct, would
cause the whole field of inquiry to be divided into two. But all of this
is metaphysics. A good definition of instinct appeared in a study by
Thomas (La Trinitè-Victor, 1952) (if we quote a recent study by a spe-
cialist we do so only for the purpose of showing many people that
the theories of Engels or Morgan, revolutionaries who were perse-
cuted on the conceited terrain of bourgeois culture, were not “dated”
or “superseded” by the latest scientific literature...): Instinct is the
hereditary knowledge of a plan of life of the species. Over the course
of evolution and of natural selection—which in the animal realm, we
can admit that it derives from a clash of the individuals as such against
the environment, but only in a physical, biological way—the obedi-
ence of the members of the same species to a common behavior is

22
determined, especially in the reproductive realm. This behavior ac-
cepted by all is automatic, “unconscious” and “irrational”. It is un-
derstandable that this mode of behavior is transmitted via heredity,
along with the morphological and structural characteristics of the or-
ganism, and the mechanism of transmission should be enclosed (al-
though there is much yet to be discovered by science) in the genes
(not in the geniuses, my dear individualists!) and in other particles of
the germinative and reproductive liquids and cells.
This mechanism, for which each individual serves as a vehicle,
only provides the rudimentary normative minimum of a plan of life
that is suitable for confronting environmental difficulties.
In social species collaboration in labor, no matter how primitive,
obtained greater results, and transmitted many other customs and
guidelines that would serve as rules. For the bourgeois and the ide-
alist the difference lies in the rational and conscious element that de-
termines the will to act, and this is when the free will of the fideist
appears, and the personal freedom of the Enlightenment. Nor is this
essential point exhausted by these variations. Our position is that we
are not adding a new power to the individual, thought and spirit,
which would mean reexamining all the data with respect to the phys-
ical mechanism from the perspective of this alleged vital principle. To
the contrary, we add a new collective power derived completely from
the needs of social production, which imposes more complex rules
and orders, and just as it displaces instinct, as it applies to guiding in-
dividuals through the sphere of technology, so too does it displace
instinct from the sexual sphere as well. It is not the individual that
caused the species to develop and become ennobled, it is the life of
the species that has developed the individual towards new dynamics
and towards higher spheres.
What there is of the primordial and bestial, is in the individual.
What is developed, complex and ordered, forming a plan of life that
is not automatic but organized and organizable, derives from collec-

23
tive life and was first born outside the minds of individuals, in order
to become part of them by difficult paths. In the meaning that we,
too, can give, outside of all idealism, to the expressions of thought,
knowledge, and science, involves products of social life: individuals,
without any exceptions, are not the donors, but the recipients and in
contemporary society they are also the parasites.
The fact that from the beginning, and ever since, economic and
sexual regulation have been interconnected for the purpose of impos-
ing order on the associated life of men, can be read between the lines
of all the religious myths, which according to the Marxist evaluation
are not gratuitous fantasies or inventions without content in which
we must not believe, as the fashionable bourgeois free-thinkers pro-
claim, but rather the first expressions of collective knowledge in the
process of its elaboration.
In the Book of Genesis (Chapter 2, Verses 19 and 20) God, be-
fore creating Eve and therefore before the expulsion from the terres-
trial paradise (in which Adam and Eve had lived unaccompanied, even
physically immortal, on the condition that they could easily gather all
the nourishing fruits, but not those of science) creates all the species
of animals from the earth, presenting them to Adam, who learned to
call them by their names. The text gives the explanation for this in-
cident: Adae vero non inveniebatur adjutor similis ejus. This means
that Adam had no helper (cooperator) of his own species. He would
be given Eve, but not to put her to work or to impregnate her. It seems
to have been stipulated that it would be lawful for them to adapt the
animals to their service. After they committed the grave error of be-
ginning with the wise serpent, God altered the fate of humanity. It
was only after they had been exiled from Eden that Eve would “know”
her companion, bearing him children that she would give birth to in
pain, and he would in turn have to earn his living by the sweat of his
brow. Thus, even in the ancient but complex wisdom of the myth,
production and reproduction are born simultaneously. If Adam do-

24
mesticated animals, it was with the help, now that he had adjutores,
of workers of his own species, similes ejus. Very rapidly the Individual
had become nothing, immutable, unmovable, deprived of the bitter
bread and the great wisdom, a sacred monster and abortion conse-
crated to leisure, truly affected by the lack of labor, of love and of sci-
ence, to which the alleged materialists of the present century still want
to sacrifice stupid incense: in its place appears the species that thinks
because it labors, among so many adjutores, neighbors and brothers.

5 Biological Heredity and Social Tradition

Ever since the first human societies, the behavior of the members of
the groups had become uniform by way of shared practices and func-
tions that, having become necessary due to the demands of produc-
tion and even of sexual reproduction, took on the form of ceremonies,
festivals and rites of a religious character. This first mechanism of col-
lective life, of unwritten rules that were nonetheless neither imposed
nor violated, was made possible not by inspirations or innate ideas
of society or of morality that were appropriate for the animal called
man, but by the determinist effect of the technical evolution of labor.
The history of the customs and usages of primitive peoples, be-
fore the times of written constitutions and coercive law, and the shock
produced in the life of the savage tribes when they first came into
contact with the white man, can only be explained by utilizing sim-
ilar investigative criteria. The seasonal periodicity of the festivals re-
lated to plowing, sowing and harvesting is obvious. At first the time
of love and fertility was also seasonal for the human species which,
due to subsequent evolution, would become, unlike any other ani-
mal, constantly ready to mate. African writers who have assimilated
the culture of the whites have described the festivals relating to sex.
Each year the adolescents who have reached puberty have certain lig-

25
atures untied that had been attached to their sexual organs since they
were born, and this bloody operation carried out by the priests is then
followed, amidst the excitation produced by the noise and drinking,
by a sexual orgy. Evidently, this type of technique arose to preserve
the reproductive capacity of the race under difficult conditions that
could lead to degeneration and sterility in the absence of any other
controls, and perhaps there are even more nauseating things in the
Kinsey report concerning sexual behavior in the capitalist era.
That the capacity for generation and production should be con-
jointly guaranteed is an old Marxist thesis, as is proven by a lovely
quote from Engels about Charlemagne’s attempt to improve agricul-
tural production in the last years of his realm by the establishment of
imperial estates (not kolkhozes). These were administered by monas-
teries, but failed, as was the case throughout the entire course of the
Middle Ages: a unisexual and non-reproducing collective did not re-
spond to the demands of continuous production. For example, the
Order of Saint Benedict might appear to have ruled by means of a
communist code, since it severely prohibited—imposing the obliga-
tion to work—any personal appropriation of the smallest product or
good, as well as any consumption outside of the collective refectory.
But this rule, due to its chastity and sterility, which rendered its mem-
bers incapable of reproducing, remained outside of life and outside of
history. A parallel study of the orders of monks and nuns in their first
phase might perhaps be able to shed some light on the problem of
the scarcity of production with respect to consumption in the Mid-
dle Ages, particularly of some of the surprising conceptions of Saint
Francis and Clare of Assisi, who did not conceive of self-mortification
to save their souls, but rather of social reform to help feed the starved
flesh of the disinherited classes.

26
6
All the norms of productive technique in fishing, hunting, the man-
ufacture of weapons, and agriculture, becoming increasingly more
complex with the passage of time, coordinated by the activity of the
capable adults, the elderly, young people, pregnant and nursing moth-
ers, and couples joined together for reproductive purposes, are trans-
mitted from generation to generation by a double road: organic and
social. By the first road the hereditary elements transmit the attitudes
and physical adaptations of the generative to the generated individual,
and the personal secondary differences come into play; by the second
road, which is becoming increasingly important, all the resources of
the group are transmitted by way of an extra-physiological but no less
material method, which is the same for everyone, and which resides
in the “equipment” and “tools” of all types that the collectivity has
managed to give itself.
In some of the articles in the “Thread of Time” series1 it was shown
that up until the discovery of more convenient modes of transmis-
sion like writing, monuments, and then the printing press, etc., man
had to rely principally on the memory of individuals, elaborating it
with collective common forms. From the first maternal admonition
we proceed to the conversations about obligatory themes and the lita-
nies of the elderly and collective recitations; song and music are the
supports of memory and the first science appears in the form of verses
rather than in the form of prose, with musical accompaniment. A
large part of the modern wisdom of capitalist civilization would not
be able to circulate except in the form of horrifying cacophonies!
1A series of articles published first in Battaglia Comunista and later in Il Pro-
gramma Comunista during the 1950s and 1960s. “Il Battilocchio nella storia”, no. 7,
April 3-17, and “Superuomo ammosciati”, no. 8, April 17-30, 1953, on the function
of the celebrity; “Fantasime carlailiane”, no. 9, May 7-21, 1953, on the same question
as it is reflected in the field of art.

27
 The course of development of all this impersonal and collective
baggage that passes from some humans to others over the passage of
time, cannot be explained except by approaching it systematically, but
the law that governs it has already been outlined: this process increas-
ingly does without the individual head as the organism is enriched,
and everyone approaches a common level; the great man, who is al-
most always a legendary personality, becomes increasingly more use-
less, just it is more and more useless to wield a larger weapon than any-
one else or to be able to multiply figures in your head more quickly
than anyone else; it will not be long before a robot will be the most in-
telligent citizen of this incredibly stupid bourgeois world, and if some
people are to be believed, the Dictator of great nations.
In any event the social force always prevails over the organic force,
which is in any case the platform of the individual spirit.
Here we may refer to an interesting new synthesis: Wallon, L’orga-
nique et le social chez l’homme, Collège de France, 1953. Although
he criticizes mechanistic materialism (that of the bourgeois epoch,
and thus one that is operative on the scale of the individual), the au-
thor discusses examples of the systems of communication between
men in society and quotes Marx, whose influence we may also dis-
cern from the language in this same part of the book. In his conclu-
sion, however, he describes the failure of idealism and of its modern
existentialist form with an apt formula: “Idealism was not content
with circumscribing the real within the limits of the imaginary (in
our minds). It has also circumscribed the image of what it consid-
ers to be real!” And after reviewing some recent examples, he draws
the sensible conclusion: “Among the organic impressions and imag-
inary mental constructs, mutual actions and reactions never cease to
be exhibited that show just how empty are the distinctions that the
various philosophical systems have established between matter and
thought, existence and intelligence, the body and the spirit.” From the
large number of such contributions one may deduce that the Marxist

28
method has offered science without an adjective (or with the adjective
of ‘contraband-’) the opportunity to take advantage of its discoveries,
and thus overcome its handicap, for one hundred years.

7 Natural Factors and Historical

Development
Over the course of a long process the living conditions of the first gen-
tile organizations, the communist phratries, continued to develop,
and naturally they did not all develop at the same rate, which var-
ied according to the physical conditions of their environments: the
nature of the soil and geological phenomena, the geography and alti-
tude, waterways, distance from the sea, the climatology of the various
zones, flora, fauna, etc. Over the course of fluctuating cycles the no-
madic lifestyles of the wandering hordes gave way to the occupation
of a fixed homeland, and to a decreasing availability of unoccupied
land as well as more frequent encounters and contacts between tribes
of different kin-groups, but also more frequent conflicts, invasions
and finally enslavement, one of the origins of the nascent division into
classes of the ancient egalitarian societies.
In the first struggles between gentes, as Engels reminds us, be-
cause slavery and mixing blood were not allowed, victory meant the
merciless annihilation of all the members of the defeated commu-
nity. This was the effect of the requirement that not too many work-
ers should be admitted into a limited terrain and of the prohibition
against breaking sexual and generative discipline, factors that were in-
separable from social development. Later relations were more com-
plex and mixing of populations and instances of breeding outside the
authorized groups became more frequent, and were more easily ac-
complished in the fertile temperate regions that hosted the first large,
stable population centers. In this first phase humans did not yet want

29
to leave the prehistoric stage. Concerning the influence of geophysi-
cal factors in the broadest sense of the term, one may also refer to the
comparison made by Engels regarding the great productive advance
obtained with the domestication of animals, not only as a source of
food but also as a force of labor. While Eurasia possesses almost all of
the world’s animal species susceptible to domestication, America had
only one, the llama, a large, sheep-like species (all the other species
were introduced after the European conquest). This is why the peo-
ples of the Americas were “arrested” in terms of social development
compared to the peoples of the old world. The fideists explain this
by claiming that in the time of Columbus redemption had not yet
reached this part of the planet, and that the light of the eternal spirit
had not yet illuminated those heads. Evidently one reasons in another
manner if one explains everything not by the absence of the supreme
Being, but by the absence of a few quite ordinary animal species.
But this method of reasoning was accepted by the Christian colonists
who attempted to exterminate the aboriginal Indians as if they were
wild animals, replacing them with African negro slaves, thus unleash-
ing an ethnic revolution whose consequences only time will tell.

8 Prehistory and Language

The passage from the racial to the national factor may in a very gen-
eral manner be assimilated to the passage from prehistory to history.
For a nation must encompass a whole in which the ethnic aspect is
just one among many others and in very few cases is it the dominant
one. Thus, before we enter the terrain of the historical scope of the
national factor the problem of the other factors that constitute the to-
tality of the racial factor must be addressed; and first of all, language.
No other explanation can be provided for the origin of language and
of dialects than the one that is derived from the material environment

30
and the productive organization. The language of a human group is
one of its means of production.
Everything we said above, based on the strict connection between
the bonds of blood in the first tribes and the beginning of social pro-
duction with certain tools, and on the basis of the preponderance of
the relation between the human group and the physical environment
over the initiative and the orientation of the individual, is found in
the central axis of historical materialism. Two texts separated by a
half-century are there to confirm this. In the “Theses on Feuerbach”
of 1845, Marx said: “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in
each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social re-
lations.” By social conditions, we Marxists mean blood, the physical
environment, tools, and the organization of any particular group.
In a letter from 1894, which we have often employed to combat
the prejudice about the function of the individual (the Great Man,
the Guignol) in history, Engels responds to the following question:
what role is played by the moment (see point three) of race and his-
torical individuals in the materialist conception of history of Marx
and Engels? As we recently recalled, Engels, thus pressed to assume a
position on the plane of the individual and Napoleon, who was ob-
viously in the back of the questioner’s mind, in order to overthrow
the whole question immediately, with respect to the question of race
gave us no more than a single tap of the chisel: “But race is itself an
economic factor.”
The cretinous representatives of the bourgeois pseudo-culture can
laugh when we go back in time to trace the immense line that leads
from the beginnings to the final result, as the powerful and deeply en-
trenched Catholic school does in the renowned trajectory that leads
from primitive chaos to the eternal blessedness of creation.
The first groups were based on a strictly pure kinship and are
group-families. They are likewise work-groups, which is to say that
their “economy” is a reaction on the part of all of them to the physical

31
environment in which each one of them has the same relation: there
is no personal property, or social classes or political power or state.
Since we are not metaphysicians or mystics—and we are therefore
not under any obligation to pour ashes over our heads and meditate
on such stains that have besmirched the human species and which
must be cleansed—we have no problem accepting the emergence and
further development of a thousand forms of mixture of blood, di-
vision of labor, the separation of society into classes, the state and
civil war. At the end of the cycle, however, with a generalized and
untraceable ethnic amalgamation, with a productive technology that
acts upon the environment with such power that it allows for the
regulation of events on the planet, we see, with the end of all racial
and social discrimination, the new communist economy; that is, the
worldwide end of individual property, from which transitory cults
had grown into monstrous fetishes: the person, the family, the father-
land.
From the very beginning, however, the economy of each people
and its degree of productive technological development was just as
much of a particular identifying characteristic as was that of the ethnic
type.
The latest research into the mists of prehistory has led the sci-
ence of human origins to acknowledge other starting points in the
appearance of the animal man on the earth, and in the evolution of
other species. One can no longer speak of a “genealogical tree” of
all of humanity or of its branches. A study by Etienne Patte (Fac-
ulty of Sciences at Poitiers, 1953) effectively refutes the inadequacy of
this traditional image. In the evolutionary tree all the forks between
two genuses or species are themselves irrevocable: as a rule the two
branches never reconnect. Human generation, on the other hand, is
an inextricable net whose spaces are continually being reconnected
with each other: if there had not been interbreeding between rela-
tives every one of us would have 8 great-grandfathers in three gen-

32
erations, or every century, but in a thousand years each person would
have more than a billion ancestors, and assuming an age for the species
of six hundred thousand years, which seems likely, the number of an-
cestors for each of us would be an astronomical number with thou-
sands of zeroes. It is therefore a net rather than a tree. And besides,
in the ethnic statistics of the modern peoples the representatives of
ethnically pure types comprise a minuscule percentage. Hence the fe-
licitous definition of humanity as a “sungameion”, which is Greek for
a complex that is totally mixed in every sense: the verb, gaméo, refers
to the sexual act and the marriage rite. And one can refer to the some-
what simplistic rule: the cross between species is sterile, that between
races is fertile.
We can understand the Pope’s position when, denying all racial
differences, a very advanced point of view in the historical sense, he
wants us to speak of races of animals but not of men. Despite the ea-
gerness with which he follows the latest scientific discoveries and their
often marvelous correspondence with dogma, he has not been able to
abandon the biblical (the Bible is more Jewish than Catholic on the
philosophical terrain) genealogical tree that descends from Adam.
Another author of a manifestly anti-materialist tendency, how-
ever, cannot resist rejecting the old separation of methods between
anthropology and historiography, since the former must seek positive
data, while the latter finds the data already available and prepared and
above all arranged in a chronological series. No one doubts that Cae-
sar lived before Napoleon; but it is a very big problem to know who
came first, the Neanderthal or proconsul africanus...
The power of the materialist method, however, applied to the
data supplied by research, easily establishes the synthesis between the
two methods, although race was one of the most decisive economic
factors in the prehistoric gens, and the nation, a much more com-
plicated entity, in the contemporary world. Only in this manner can
one properly situate the function of languages, at first common to a

33
narrowly defined consanguinary and cooperative group without any
connections with external groups, or only with warlike connections,
which are today shared by populations that inhabit vast territories.
At first those groups that had a common circle of reproduction
and productive tools and capacity for all that was necessary for ma-
terial life also had a common phonetic expression. One may say that
the use of sounds for communication purposes between individuals
first arose among the animal species. But the modulation of the sound
that the vocal organs of any particular species of animal are capable of
emitting (a purely physiological inheritance in the structure and in the
functional possibilities of these organs) falls far short of the formation
of a language with a certain set of vocables. The vocable does not arise
to designate the person who speaks or the person to whom the speech
is directed, a member of the opposite sex or a part of the body or light,
clouds, land, water, food or danger. Language composed of vocables
was born when labor based on tools was born, the production of ob-
jects of consumption by way of the associated labor of men.

9 Social Labor and Speech

All common human activity for productive purposes demands, for
useful collaboration, a system of communication among the workers.
Starting from the simple effort involved in raiding or self-defense, for
which instinctive incitements such as pushing or animal cries suffice,
at the moment when action is necessary at a certain time or place, or
with a particular means (primitive tool, weapon, etc.), and through a
very long series of failed attempts and corrections, speech arose. This
procedure is opposed to that of the idealist illusion: an innovator imag-
ines the new “technological” method in his brain without having ever
seen it before, which he explains by telling the others of his kind, and
directs them to implement it with his orders. The way we see this pro-

34
cess, it is not a series that proceeds from thought, then to speech, and
only then to action, but precisely the reverse.
One more demonstration of the real natural process of language is
found once again in a biblical myth, that of the Tower of Babel. Here
we are already in the presence of an authentic state wielding immense
power, with formidable armies that capture prisoners, and in posses-
sion of a huge captive labor force. This power engaged in vast con-
struction projects, especially in its capital (the technological abilities
of the Babylonians not only with regard to construction, but also hy-
draulic engineering and similar fields, is a matter of historical record),
and according to the legend, the state sought to build a tower so high
that its pinnacle would touch heaven: this is the standard myth of hu-
man presumption punished by the divinity, the same as the fire stolen
by Prometheus, the flight of Daedalus, etc. The innumerable workers,
overseers, and architects, are of distinct and scattered origins, they do
not speak the same languages, they do not understand one another,
the execution of their orders and plans is chaotic and contradictory
and the building, once it reached a certain height, due to errors rooted
in the linguistic confusion, collapsed into ruins, and the builders ei-
ther died or else fled in terror from this divine punishment.
The complex meaning of this story is that one cannot build some-
thing if there is no common language: stones, hands, planks, ham-
mers, and picks are no good if the tool, the instrument of produc-
tion, lacks a word in the same language and with the same lexicog-
raphy and formula, common to all and widely known. Among the
savages of central Africa one finds the same legend: the tower was
made of wood and was supposed to reach the moon. Now that we
all speak “American”, it is child’s play to build skyscrapers, which are
much more stupid than the wonderful towers of the barbarians and
the savages.
There is thus no doubt about the Marxist definition of language,
according to which it is one of the instruments of production. The

35
above-cited article by Wallon does no less than refer, when it examines
the most important doctrines, to the one that we follow: “according
to Marx language is linked to the human production of tools and of
objects that are granted definite attributes”. And the author chooses
two magisterial quotations, the first from Marx (The German Ideol-
ogy): “[Men] begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon
as they begin to produce their means of subsistence”; and the second
from Engels (The Dialectics of Nature): “First labour, after it and then
with it speech – these were the two most essential stimuli under the
influence of which the brain of the ape gradually changed into that
of man”. And Engels, when he wrote that, did not know the results
that, contrary to their expectations, would later be published by writ-
ers from the pure idealist school (Saller, What Is Anthropology?, Uni-
versity of Munich). Today the human brain has a volume of 1,400 cu-
bic centimeters (we know—this goes for geniuses as well as for dum-
mies like us!). A very long time ago, in the time of Sinanthropus-
Pithecanthropus with his 1,000 cubic centimeters of brain, it would
seem that this ancestor of ours already had the first notions of magic,
as is attested by the nature of his burials, although he was frequently
a cannibal; but besides using fire for some time, he had various tools:
drinking bowls made from animal skulls, stone weapons, etc. But the
discoveries made in South Africa have provided yet more surprises:
about six hundred thousand years ago (the figure is from Wallon), a
precocious ancestor of ours, with only 500 cubic centimeters of brain,
already used fire, hunted and ate the cooked meat of animals, walked
upright like us and—this is the sole rectification that needs to be made
with regard to the data provided by Engels (1884)—it seems that he
no longer lived in the trees like his close relative “australopithecus”
but bravely defended himself from wild beasts on the ground.
It is odd that the writer from whom we take this information, dis-
oriented by this data that serves to more firmly embed the materialist
theory on its foundation, should take refuge from anthropology in

36
psychology, in order to express his regrets concerning the decline of
the individual who had been elevated by a mysterious extra-organic
breath; and that in the modern epoch of overpopulation and me-
chanicism the individual degenerates by becoming the masses, ceasing
to be a man. But who is more human: our friendly pithecanthropus
with 500 cubic centimeters or the scientist with his 1,400 cubic cen-
timeters, who devotes himself to hunting butterflies under the Arch
of Titus in order to erect the pious equation: official science + ideal-
ism = despair?

10 Economic Base and Superstructure

The concept of the “economic base” of a particular human society
extends beyond the boundaries of the superficial interpretation that
restricts it to the remuneration of labor and to commodity exchange.
It embraces the entire domain of the forms of reproduction of the
species, or family institutions, and while technical resources and avail-
able tools and material apparatus of every kind form an integral part
of it, its content is not limited to a simple inventory of materials, but
includes all available mechanisms for passing on from one generation
to another all social “technological knowledge”. In this sense and as
general networks of communication and transmission, after spoken
language we must also include under the rubric of means of produc-
tion, writing, song, music, the graphic arts, and the press, as they ap-
pear as means of transmission of the productive legacy. In the Marxist
view, literature, poetry and science are also higher and more highly-
differentiated forms of productive instruments and were born in re-
sponse to the same requirement of the immediate life of society.
With regard to this issue questions of interpretation of historical
materialism arose in the camp of the workers movement: what social
phenomena really constitute the “productive base” or the economic

37
preconditions, which explain the ideological and political superstruc-
tures that are characteristic of any particular historical society?
Everyone knows that Marxism opposed to the concept of a long
and gradual evolution of human society the concept of sudden turn-
ing points between one epoch and another, epochs characterized by
different social forms and relations. With these turning points the
productive base and the superstructures change. For the purpose of
clarifying this concept we have often had resort to the classical texts,
both to establish the various formulas and ideas in their correct con-
text as well as to clarify just what it is that suddenly changes when the
revolutionary crisis supervenes.
In the letters we quoted above in which Engels responded to the
questions sent to him by young students of Marxism, Engels insists
on reciprocal reactions between base and superstructure: the politi-
cal state of a particular class is a perfect example of a superstructure
but it in turn acts—by imposing tariffs, collecting taxes, etc.—on the
economic base, as Engels recalls, among other things.
Later, during the time of Lenin, it was urgently necessary to clar-
ify the process of the class revolution. The state, political power, is
the superstructure that is most completely shattered in a way that
we could call instantaneous, in order to give way to another analo-
gous but opposed structure. The relations that govern the produc-
tive economy, however, are not changed so rapidly, even if their con-
flict with the highly developed productive forces was the primary mo-
tor force for the revolution. This is why wage labor, commerce, etc.,
did not disappear overnight. With respect to the other aspects of the
superstructure, those that are most enduring and would survive the
original economic base itself (that is, capitalism), are the traditional
ideologies that had been disseminated, even among the victorious rev-
olutionary working class, over the duration of the long preceding pe-
riod of serfdom. Thus, for example, the legal superstructure, in its
written and practically implemented form, would be rapidly changed

38
— while the other superstructure of religious beliefs would disappear
very slowly.
We have on many occasions referred to Marx’s lapidary Preface to
his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859. It would
not be a bad idea to pause and consider this text before continuing
with our examination of the question of language.
The productive material forces of society: they are, in particular
phases of development, the labor power of human bodies, the tools
and instruments that are used in its application, the fertility of the
cultivated soil, the machines that add mechanical and physical energy
to human labor power; all the methods applied to the land and to the
materials of those manual and mechanical forces, procedures that a
particular society understands and possesses.
Relations of production relative to a particular type of society are
the “definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely re-
lations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development
of their material forces of production.” Relations of production in-
clude the freedom or the prohibition of occupying land to cultivate it,
of using tools, machines, manufactured products, of having the prod-
ucts of labor to consume them, move them from place to place and
to assign them to others. This in general. The particular relations of
production are slavery, serfdom, wage labor, commerce, landed prop-
erty, industrial enterprise. The relations of production, with an ex-
pression that reflects not the economic but the juridical aspect, can
also be called property relations or also in other texts, forms of prop-
erty; over the land, over the slave, over the product of the labor of the
serf, over the commodities, over the workshops and machines, etc.
This whole set of relations constitutes the base or economic structure
of society.
The essential dynamic concept is the determinant clash between
the forces of production, in their degree of evolution and develop-
ment, and the relations of production or of property, the social rela-

39
tions (all equivalent formulas).
The superstructure, that is, what is derived from, what is superim-
posed on the base economic structure, for Marx is basically the juridi-
cal and political framework of any particular society: constitutions,
laws, courts, military forces, the central government power. This su-
perstructure nonetheless has a material and concrete aspect. But Marx
makes the distinction between the reality in the transformation of
the relations of production and in the relations of property and law,
that is of power, and this transformation such as it is displayed in the
“consciousness” of the time and in that of the victorious class. This
is (to this very day) a derivation of a derivation; a superstructure of
the superstructure, and forms the mutable terrain of common sense,
of ideology, of philosophy, and, in a certain way (insofar as it is not
transformed into a practical norm), of religion.
Modes of production (it is preferable not to apply to this con-
cept the term, “forms”, which is used for the more restricted con-
cept, forms of property)—Produktionsweisen—are “epochs marking
progress in the economic development of society” that Marx summa-
rizes broadly as of the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois
types.
We must illustrate this with an example: the bourgeois revolution
in France. Productive forces: agriculture and peasant serfs—the arti-
sans and their workshops in the cities—the great manufacturing cen-
ters and factories, armories. Relations of production or forms of tra-
ditional property: glebe serfdom of the peasants and feudal author-
ity over the land and those who cultivate it—the corporative bonds
in the artisanal crafts. Juridical and political superstructure: power of
the nobility and the church hierarchy, absolute monarchy. Ideologi-
cal superstructure: authority of divine right, Catholicism, etc. Mode
of production: feudalism.
The revolutionary transformation assumed the following form:
immediately as the transfer of the power of the nobles and the church

40
into the hands of the bourgeoisie; the new juridical-political super-
structure is elective parliamentary democracy. The relations that have
been abolished are: glebe serfdom and the artisanal guilds; the new
relations that appear are: industrial wage labor (with the survival of
independent artisans and small-scale peasant property), and free do-
mestic trade, even with regard to the sale of land.
The productive force of the most important factories is enormously
developed with the absorption of the former peasant serfs and ar-
tisans. The force of industrial machinery also develops to the same
degree. The ideological superstructure undergoes a process of grad-
ual replacement that begins before the revolution, and which has not
concluded yet: fideism and legitimism are being replaced by free thought,
enlightened values and rationalism.
The new mode of production which is spreading throughout France
and even beyond it, replacing feudalism, is capitalism: in it, political
power is not of the “people”, as it appears in the “consciousness” that
this “period of transformation” has with regard to itself, but of the
class of the industrial capitalists and of the bourgeois landowners.
In order to distinguish the two “strata” of the superstructure one
may adopt the terms of the superstructure of force (positive law, state)
and the superstructure of consciousness (ideology, philosophy, reli-
gion, etc.).
Marx says that material force, or violence, is itself an economic
agent. Engels, in the passages quoted above, and in his book on Feuer-
bach, says the same thing when he states that the state (which is force)
acts on the economy and influences the economic base.
The state of a new class is therefore a powerful resource for the
transformation of productive relations. After 1789 feudal relations
in France were dismantled due to the advanced development of the
modern productive forces that had been emerging for some time. Even
the restoration of 1815, although it did once again hand over power to
the landowning aristocracy by reestablishing the legitimist monarchy,

41
was unable to overthrow the relations of production, the forms of
property, and neither stifled manufacturing industry nor did it restore
the great estates of the nobles. The change in power and the transfor-
mation of the forms of production can proceed historically and for
limited periods of time in opposite directions.
The burning issue in Russia, in October 1917? Political power, the
superstructure of force that in February had passed from the feudal
elements to the bourgeoisie, passed into the hands of the workers of
the cities, supported in their struggle by the poor peasants. The juridi-
cal state superstructure acquired proletarian forms (dictatorship and
dissolution of the democratic assembly). The ideological superstruc-
tures obtained a powerful impulse among broad layers of the pop-
ulation in favor of the ideological superstructure of the proletariat,
despite the desperate resistance of the old ideological superstructures
and that of the bourgeois or semi-bourgeois. The productive forces
with an anti-feudal nature could proceed unopposed in liberated in-
dustry and agriculture. Could one say that the relations of produc-
tion, in the years immediately following October, were transformed
into socialist relations of production? Of course not, and such a trans-
formation would in any case take more than a few months. Were they
simply transformed into capitalist relations of production? It is not
correct to say that all of them were transformed totally into capital-
ist relations of production because pre-capitalist forms survived for a
long time, as everyone knows. But it would also be inadequate to say
that they were moving in the direction of being transformed exclu-
sively into capitalist relations.
Even disregarding the first measures of communism and anti-market
policies implemented during the civil war (housing, bread, transport),
and in view of the fact that power is an economic agent of the high-
est order, the transformation of the relations of production under a
democratic bourgeois state is one thing and the same process under
the proletarian political dictatorship is another.

42
 The mode of production is defined by the totality of relations of
production and political and juridical forms. If the entire Russian cy-
cle up until today has led to the full-fledged capitalist mode of pro-
duction and that today in Russia socialist relations of production do
not exist, this is related to the fact that after 1917, after October, the
proletarian revolution in the West did not take place, the importance
of which did not just lie in its capacity to bolster the soviet political
power so that the Russian proletariat would not lose it, which is what
happened later, but above all to supply to the Russian economy pro-
ductive forces that were available in excess in the West, and in this
manner assure the transition to socialism of the Russian relations of
production.
The relations of production are not immediately transformed at
the moment of the political revolution.
Once it was established that the further development of the pro-
ductive forces in Russia was the other condition, just as important as
the consolidation of political power (Lenin), a formulation of the fol-
lowing kind is incorrect: the only historical task of Bolshevik power
after October was to pursue the transition from feudal to bourgeois
social relations. Until the end of the revolutionary wave that followed
the first world war, which lasted until about 1923, the task of the power
that had arisen in October consisted in working for the transforma-
tion of the feudal social modes and relations into proletarian ones.
This work was carried out by the only means possible at the time and
therefore it followed the royal road: only later was it possible to for-
mulate the claim that we are confronted by a state that is not socialist,
nor does it demonstrate a tendency in that direction. The relations
of production after October are actually part capitalist and part pre-
capitalist and to a quantitatively minimal extent are post-capitalist;
the historical form or, more precisely, the historical mode of produc-
tion, cannot be defined as capitalist, but as potentially proletarian and
socialist. This is what matters!

43
 In this way one escapes from the impasse of the formula: bour-
geois economic base, proletarian and socialist superstructures. And
this is accomplished precisely by not denying the second term, which
prevailed for at least six years after the conquest of the dictatorship.

11 Stalin and Linguistics

2 The Stalinist theory that language is not a superstructure with re-
spect to the economic base constitutes a false way of posing the prob-
lem that we need to solve, since the result that Stalin seeks to obtain
lies elsewhere: at every step of the transition from one historical mode
of production to the next we always find a change, both in the super-
structure as well as the base or economic structure, a change in the
power of the classes and of the position of the classes in society. But
the national language does not follow the avatars of either the base
or the superstructures since it does not belong to a class but to all the
people in a particular country. Therefore, in order to save language
and linguistics from the effects of the social revolution, we have to
lead them (gradually, together with the national culture and the cult
of the fatherland) along the banks of the turbulent river of history,
outside of the terrain of the productive base as well as that of its po-
litical and ideological derivations.
According to Stalin (Marxism and Problems of Linguistics), over
the last few years in Russia, “the old, capitalist base has been elimi-
nated in Russia and a new, socialist base has been built. Correspond-
2 The essay on Stalin and linguistics—which is discussed in part in the article,
“Church and Faith, Individual and Reason, Class and Theory”, Battaglia Comu-
nista, no. 17, 1950—was preceded by the following note: “The digression is not in-
appropriate in this arrangement of the material utilized in the report, since it in-
volves the analysis of the doctrine expounded by Stalin with regard to linguistics,
all of which is based on the distinctions, employed in a hardly consistent manner,
between base and superstructure”.

44
ingly, the superstructure on the capitalist base has been eliminated
and a new superstructure created corresponding to the socialist base...
But in spite of this the Russian language has remained basically what
it was before the October Revolution”.
The merit of these gentlemen (it is all the same whether this was
written by Stalin, or whether it was written by Secretary X or by De-
partment Y) is the fact that they have demonstrated a profound un-
derstanding of the art of simple, clear presentation, accessible to all, as
has so often been said for the last hundred years in bourgeois cultural
propaganda, and above all presented in a brazenly concrete manner.
But this presentation that seems so direct and accessible is nothing but
a con job, it is a complete relapse into the most vapid sort of bourgeois
thinking.
The entire process is supposed to have taken place “correspond-
ingly”. How simple! Not only must we respond by pointing out that
this process has not taken place, but also that even if it did, it would
not have happened like that. In this formula that might have been
drafted by a municipal clerk there is not a trace of dialectical materi-
alism. The base influences the structure and has an active character?
And in what sense does the derivative superstructure react in turn so
that it is not totally malleable and passive? And with what cycles and
in what order and at what historical velocity does the transformation
and the process of substitution take place? Bah, these are Byzantine
discourses! Enough of this moving the lever to the right and then to
the left: Elimination! Creation! By God, out with the creator, out
with the eliminator! This kind of materialism does not function with-
out a demiurge, everything is converted into something that is con-
scious and voluntary, and there is no longer anything that is necessary
and determined.
In any case, this argument can be shifted onto real ground: the
economic base and the superstructure, by way of complex vicissitudes,
had passed from being feudal under the Czar to being fully capitalist

45
at the time of Stalin’s death. Since the Russian language is basically
the same, the language is not a part of the superstructure nor does it
form part of the base.
It would appear that this entire polemic is directed against a school
of linguistics that suddenly fell under suspicion, and that the lead-
ing figure of this school is the Soviet university professor, N. Y. Marr,
with whose works we are not acquainted. Marr had said that language
forms part of the superstructure. Listening to his accuser, we think
that Marr is a good Marxist. His accuser says of him: “At one time,
N. Y. Marr, seeing that his formula—‘language is a superstructure
on the base’—encountered objections, decided to ‘reshape’ it and an-
nounced that ‘language is an instrument of production.’ Was N. Y.
Marr right in including language in the category of instruments of
production? No, he certainly was not.” (Stalin, op. cit.).
And why was he mistaken? According to Stalin there is a certain
analogy between language and the instruments of production, be-
cause the latter can also have a certain indifference with respect to
classes. What Stalin means is that, for example, both the plow and the
hoe can be used in the feudal, the bourgeois, and the socialist society.
The difference, however, for which Marr was condemned (and Marx
and Engels: labor, the production of tools in combination with lan-
guage) is this: the instruments of production produce material goods,
but language does not!
But the instruments of production do not produce material goods,
either! The goods are produced by the man who uses the instruments
of production! These instruments are employed by men in produc-
tion. When a child first grabs the hoe by the blade, the father shouts
at him: hold it by the handle. This cry, which is later transformed into
a regular form of “instruction”, is, like the hoe, employed in produc-
tion.
Stalin’s dull-witted conclusion reveals that the error is his: if lan-
guage, as Stalin claims, were to produce material goods, then charla-

46
tans would be the richest people on earth! Yet is this not precisely the
case? The worker works with his arms, the engineer with language:
who earns more? It seems to us that we once recounted the story of
that provincial landowner who, sitting in the shade and smoking his
pipe, was constantly shouting, ‘swing that pick!’ to the day-laborer
he had hired, who was sweating and silently working. The landowner
knew that even a brief let-up in the pace of the work would reduce his
profits.
Dialectically, it seems to us that Marr had not mended his ways de-
spite the spotlight that was directed on him: dialectically, because we
are not familiar with him or his books. We have also said, for example,
that poetry, from its very beginnings as a choral song for the trans-
mission of memories, with a magical-mystical-technological charac-
ter, the first means of transmitting the social patrimony, has the char-
acter of a means of production. That is why we included poetry among
the superstructures of a particular epoch. The same is true of lan-
guage. Language in general, and its organization into verses, are in-
struments of production. But a particular poem, a particular school
of poetry, relative to a country or a century, because they are differ-
entiated from the preceding and following poems and schools, form
part of the ideological and artistic superstructure of a particular eco-
nomic form, of a particular mode of production. Engels: the upper
stage of barbarism “Begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes
into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use
for literary records.... We find the upper stage of barbarism at its high-
est in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad.” Using this model
we can also seek out other works and show that The Divine Comedy
was the swan song of feudalism and that the tragedies of Shakespeare
were the prologues to capitalism.
For the last Pontifex Maximus of Marxism the distinctive means
of production of an epoch is forged iron but not alphabetic writing,
because the latter does not produce material goods! But the human

47
use of alphabetic writing was indispensable, among other things, for
the capability to produce the specialty steels of modern metallurgy.
The same thing is true of language. It is a means of production in
every epoch, but individual expression by means of language is part of
the superstructure, as was the case with Dante Alighieri who did not
write his poem in the Latin of the classics or the Church, but in the
vulgar Italian, or as was the case of the language reform that marked
the definitive abandonment of the old Saxon tongue and its replace-
ment by modern literary German.
The same goes for the plow and the hoe. While it is true that
any particular instrument of production can be found that spans two
great social epochs separated by a class revolution, it is also true that
the entire set of tools of any particular society “defines” it and “com-
pels” it—due to the open conflict between the relations of produc-
tion—to assume the new, rival form. In barbarism we find the potter’s
wheel and in capitalism the modern turntable with a reliable precision
motor. And now and then a tool disappears in order to be converted,
as in the classic case of the spinning wheel mentioned by Engels, into
a museum piece.
Likewise with the plow and the hoe. The society of industrial cap-
italism cannot eliminate the small-scale, inefficient farming that re-
quires the backbone of pithecanthropus, that was once so proudly
erect, to be twisted and bent. But a communist organization with
a complete industrial base will undoubtedly only engage in mech-
anized farming. And in this manner the language of the capitalists
will be destroyed, and one will no longer hear those common formu-
las employed by the Stalinists who try to make us believe that they
are marching forward together with that all-too-contradictory hodge-
podge: morality, liberty, justice, popular rights, progressive, demo-
cratic, constitutional, constructive, productive, humanitarian, etc., wh-
ich precisely comprise the apparatus thanks to which the most wealth
ends up in the pockets of the loudmouths: a function that is identical

48
with that of certain other, material, tools: the foreman’s whistle, the
policeman’s handcuffs.

12 The Idealist Theory of National Language

To deny that human language in general has an origin and a function
as a productive instrument, and that the superstructures of class soci-
eties include (even among those that are not immediately but gradu-
ally replaced) the local and contingent spoken and written language, is
equivalent to a complete regression to idealist doctrines, and amounts
to politically embracing the bourgeois postulate of the transition to a
common language on the part of the literate people of diverse dialects
and the erudite persons of an entire politically united country, a real
linguistic revolution that heralded the advent of the capitalist epoch.
Since, according to the text that we are examining, language is not
a superstructure of the economic base, nor is it a productive instru-
ment, we have to ask: exactly how is it defined?
Let’s see: “Language is a medium, an instrument with the help
of which people communicate with one another, exchange thoughts
and understand each other. Being directly connected with thinking,
language registers and fixes in words, and in words combined into
sentences, the results of the process of thinking and achievements of
man’s cognitive activity, and thus makes possible the exchange of thou-
ghts in human society” (Stalin, op. cit.). This is therefore supposed to
be the Marxist solution of the problem. We do not see how any or-
thodox traditional ideologist could object to this definition. It is clear
that according to this definition humanity prospers by means of a la-
bor of research elaborated in thought and formulated in ideas, passing
from this individual phase to a collective one involving its application
by way of the use of language, which allows the discoverer to pass on
the results of his discovery to other men. And so the materialist devel-

49
opment with which we are concerned here (in conformance with the
usual quotations from our basic texts) is completely discarded: from
action to the word, from the word to the idea, this being understood
not as a process that is carried out by an individual, but by society; or
more correctly: from social labor to language, from language to sci-
ence, to collective thought. The function of thought in the individ-
ual is derivative and passive. Stalin’s definition is thus pure idealism.
The presumed exchange of thoughts is the projection of bourgeois
commodity exchange into the realm of fantasy.
It is very strange that the accusation of idealism falls upon the dis-
graced Marr, who, by upholding the thesis of changes in language,
apparently reached the point where he could predict a decline in the
function of language, which would then give way to other forms.
Marr is accused of having thus hypothesized that thought could be
transmitted without language, and therefore of having become mired
in the swamp of idealism. But in this swamp those who presume they
are floating high above Marr are the most pitiful. Marr’s thesis is de-
picted as in contradiction with this passage from Karl Marx: Lan-
guage is “the immediate reality of thought... Ideas do not exist di-
vorced from language.”
But is it not the case that this clear statement of the materialist the-
sis is totally denied by Stalin’s definition mentioned above, according
to which language is reduced to a means for the exchange of thoughts
and ideas?
We shall reconstruct Marr’s bold theory in our own way (we may
do so thanks to the possession of a theory of the party that transcends
generations and borders). Language is — and this is where Stalin stops
— an instrument by means of which men communicate with each
other. Does communication among men have nothing to do with
production? This is what bourgeois economic theory maintains, ac-
cording to which it appears that each person produces for himself and
that he only encounters the other persons by way of the market, to

50
see if he can cheat them. The correct Marxist expression would not
be “language is a medium, an instrument with the help of which peo-
ple communicate with one another, exchange thoughts and under-
stand each other”, but “language is a medium, an instrument with the
help of which people communicate with one another and help each
other produce”. We therefore recognize that it is correct to consider
language as a means of production. And as for that metaphysical “ex-
change thoughts and understand each other”, six hundred thousand
years have passed and it would appear we have all gone to the same
school and we still do not understand it!
Language is thus a technological means of communication. It is
the first such means. But is it the only one? Certainly not. Over the
course of social evolution an increasingly more diverse series of such
means has appeared, and Marr’s speculation that other means might
someday largely replace the spoken language is not so far-fetched. Marr
is by no means saying that thought as an immaterial expression on
the part of an individual subject will be transmitted to the other sub-
jects without taking the natural form of language. Marr is evidently
suggesting, with the formula that has been translated as a “process of
thinking”, that it will develop in forms that will be beyond language,
not with reference to the metaphysical individual invention, but to
the legacy of technological knowledge typical of a highly developed
society. There is nothing eschatological or magical about this.
Let’s take a look at a very simple example. The helmsman on a gal-
ley issued his orders “out loud”. Just like the pilot of the sailing vessel
and the skippers on the first steamships. “Full Steam Ahead ... Full
power . . . Back to half power ...” The ships became much bigger and
the captain shouted as loud as he could to issue orders to the boiler
room, but this soon proved to be unsatisfactory, and after a period
when voicepipes (a truly primitive invention) were used, a mechani-
cal telephone with a crank was introduced, and later an electrical tele-
phone, which connected the signaling quarters with the engineer. Fi-

51
nally, the instrument panel of a great airliner is full of displays and
readouts that transmit all kinds of information from all parts of the
plane. The spoken word is indeed being replaced, but by means that
are just as material as it is, although obviously not as natural, just as
modern tools are less natural than a cut-off piece of a branch used as
a club.
We need not enumerate all the stages in this very long series. The
spoken word, the written word, the press, the infinity of algorithms,
of symbolic mathematics, which have now become international; which
is what happens in all the fields of technology and general services
which are regulated by conventions of open access for the transmis-
sion of precise information concerning meteorology, electronics, as-
tronomy, etc. All electronic applications, radar and other such tech-
nologies, all types of signal receivers, are so many more new means of
connection among men, which have been rendered necessary due to
the complex systems of life and production, and which already in a
hundred different ways bypass the word, grammar and syntax, whose
immanence and eternity is defended by Stalin, who subjected Marr to
such a formidable onslaught.
Is it possible that the capitalist system will cease to consider that
the mode of conjugating the verb “to have”, or the verb “to value”, or
of declining the possessive adjective and declaring that the personal
pronoun must be the basis of any utterance, is eternal? Someday the
use of the words “Your Honor” and “Your Lordship”, just like the old
“Thou”, will make people laugh, just like the humble servant and the
good business deals made by the travelling salesmen.

13 References and Distortions

In all Marxist analyses the thesis that the demand for a national lan-
guage is a historical characteristic of all the anti-feudal revolutions is

52
of fundamental importance, since this national language was neces-
sary to unite and establish communication between all the compart-
ments of the emerging national market, in order to facilitate the trans-
fer from one part of the national territory to another of the proletari-
ans that had been liberated from glebe serfdom, and in order to fight
against the influence of traditional religious, scholastic, and cultural
forms that relied in part on the use of Latin as a common language of
the learned, and in part on the diversity of local dialects.
To justify his novel theory of extra-classist language—a theory
that is truly novel in the Marxist sense—Stalin strives to overcome
the contradiction, evidently invoked from various angles, with texts
from Lafargue, Marx, Engels, and even ... Stalin. The good example
offered by Lafargue is dismissed in summary fashion. In an article en-
titled, “The French Language Before and After the Revolution”, La-
fargue discussed an unforeseen linguistic revolution that took place
in France between 1789 and 1794. That is too short a period of time,
Stalin says, and if a very small number of words disappeared from the
language, they were replaced by new ones. But the words that disap-
peared were precisely those words that were most closely related to
the relations of social life. Some were proscribed by laws passed by the
Convention. There is a well-known counterrevolutionary anecdote:

“What is your name, citizen?”

“Marquise de Saint Roiné.”
“Il n’y a plus de marquis! ” (There are no more Marquis!)
“De Saint Roiné!”
“Il n’y a plus de ‘de’! ” (There are no more noble prefixes
for names!)
“Saint Roiné!”
“Il n’y a plus de Saints! ”
“Roiné!”
“Il n’y a plus de rois! ” (There are no more kings!)

53
 “Je suis né! ” (I was born!)

Stalin was right: the verb form “né” has not changed.
In a text entitled “Saint Max”, which we confess we have not read,
Karl Marx said that the bourgeoisie have their own language, which
“itself is a product of the bourgeoisie” and that this language is per-
meated with the style of commercialism and of buying and selling.
In fact, the merchants of Amberes, during the depths of the Middle
Ages, were able to understand the merchants of Florence, and this
is one of the “glories” of the Italian language, the mother language
of capital. Just as in music you see the words “andante”, “allegro”,
“pianissimo”, etc. everywhere, so too in every European marketplace
one heard the words “firma”, “sconto”, “tratta”, “riporto” and ev-
erywhere the pestilential jargon of commercial correspondence was
assimilated, “in response to your request...”. So what answer does
Stalin provide for this indisputable quotation? He invites us to read
another passage from the same text by Marx:

“. . . in every modern developed language, partly as a re-

sult of the historical development of the language from
pre-existing material, as in the Romance and Germanic
languages, partly owing to the crossing and mixing of na-
tions, as in the English language, and partly as a result of
the concentration of the dialects within a single nation
brought about by economic and political concentration,
the spontaneously evolved speech has been turned into
a national language.”

So? The linguistic superstructure is still subject to the same process as

the state superstructure and the economic base. But just as the con-
centration of capital, the unification of national exchange, and po-
litical concentration in the capitalist state are not instantly realized
in their final form, since they are historical results linked to bour-

54
geois rule and its cycle, the transition from local dialects to a uni-
tary language constitutes a phenomenon that also proceeds in accor-
dance with all these factors. The market, the state and power are na-
tional insofar as they are bourgeois. Language becomes national inso-
far as it is the language of the bourgeoisie. Engels, who is always cited
by Stalin, says, in The Condition of the Working Class in England:
the English “working-class has gradually become a race wholly apart
from the English bourgeoisie.... The workers speak other dialects,
have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles,
a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie.”
The patch applied here is also threadbare: Engels does not admit,
by saying this, that there are class languages, since he is talking about
dialects, and dialect is a derivative of the national language. But have
we not established that the national language is a synthesis of dialects
(or the result of a struggle among dialects) and that this is a class pro-
cess, linked to the victory of a particular class, the bourgeoisie?
Lenin must therefore be forgiven for having recognized the exis-
tence of two cultures in capitalism, one bourgeois and the other prole-
tarian, and that the campaign in favor of a national culture in capital-
ism is a nationalist campaign. Emasculating Lafargue, that valiant fel-
low, might be easy, but to then go on and do the same to Marx, Engels
and Lenin is a difficult task. The answer to all of this is that language is
one thing and culture is another. But which comes first? For the ide-
alist who acknowledges abstract thought, culture is before and above
language, but for the materialist, for whom the word comes before
the idea, culture can only be formed on the basis of language. The
position of Marx and Lenin is therefore as follows: the bourgeoisie
will never admit that its culture is a class culture, since it claims that
it is the national culture of a particular people, and thus the overval-
uation of the national language serves as a major obstacle that stands
in the way of the formation of a proletarian and revolutionary class
culture, or rather, theory.

55
 The best part is where Stalin, in the manner of Filippo Argenti,
engages in self-criticism. At the 16th Congress of the party he said that
in the era of world socialism all the national languages would be com-
bined into one. This formula seems to be very radical, and it is not easy
to reconcile it with the other one offered some time later concerning
the struggle between two languages that ends with the victory of one
of them which absorbs the other without the latter leaving a trace.
The author then attempts to exculpate himself by saying that his de-
tractors had not understood the fact that it was a matter of two very
different historical epochs: the struggle and the merging of languages
takes place in the midst of the capitalist epoch, while the formation of
the international language will take place in the fully socialist epoch.
“To demand that these formulas should not be at variance with each
other, that they should not exclude each other, is just as absurd as it
would be to demand that the epoch of the domination of capitalism
should not be at variance with the epoch of the domination of so-
cialism, that socialism and capitalism should not exclude each other.”
This jewel leaves us stupefied. Have not all the propaganda efforts on
the part of the Stalinists been devoted to maintaining that the rule of
socialism in Russia not only does not exclude the existence of capi-
talism in the West, but in addition that the two forms can peacefully
coexist?
Only one legitimate conclusion can be drawn from this whole
shameful display. Russian power can coexist with the capitalist na-
tions of the West because it, too, is a national power, with its national
language that is fiercely defended in all its integrity, far removed from
the future international language, just as its “culture” is far removed
from the revolutionary theory of the world proletariat.
The same author, however, is forced at a certain point to recog-
nize that the national formation of languages strictly reflects that of
the national states and national markets. “Later, with the appearance
of capitalism, the elimination of feudal division and the formation of

56
national markets, nationalities developed into nations, and the lan-
guages of nationalities into national languages.” This is well said. But
then he stumbles and says that, “History shows that national languages
are not class, but common languages, common to all the members
of each nation and constituting the single language of that nation”
(Stalin, op. cit.). History dictated this lesson when it relapsed into cap-
italism. Just as in Italy, where the nobles, the priests and the educated
elites spoke Latin, and the people spoke Tuscan, in England the no-
bles spoke French and the people spoke English, so too in Russia the
revolutionary struggle led to the following result: the aristocrats spoke
French, the socialists spoke German and the peasants spoke what we
shall not deign to call Russian, but rather a dozen languages and a
hundred dialects. Had the movement continued in accordance with
Lenin’s revolutionary designs it would soon have had a language of its
own: everyone would have spoken a garbled version of “international
French”. But Joseph Stalin did not understand any of this French, ei-
ther: only Georgian and Russian. He was the man of the new situa-
tion, a situation in which one language drags ten others along with
it and in order to do so employs the weapon of literary tradition; the
new situation was that of an authentic ruthless nationalism, which,
like all the others, followed the law of concentration with regard to
language by declaring it to be an intangible cultural patrimony.
It is unusual—or perhaps not so unusual if this movement does
not refuse to exploit the sympathies and the support of the foreign
proletariat for Marxist traditions—that the text claims to support that
decisive passage from Lenin: “Language is the most important means
of human intercourse. Unity of language and its unimpeded develop-
ment form one of the most important conditions for genuinely free
and extensive commercial intercourse appropriate to modern capital-
ism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its separate
classes.” It is therefore quite clear that the postulate of national lan-
guage is not immanent but historical: it is linked—usefully—to the

57
appearance of developed capitalism.
It is clear, however, that everything changes and is turned upside
down when capitalism falls, and with it commercial society and the di-
vision of society into classes. The national languages will perish along
with these social institutions. The revolution that fights against them
is alien to and an enemy of the demand for a national language, once
capitalism has been defeated.

14 Personal and Economic Dependence

It constitutes a radical departure from historical materialism to limit
it to the epochs during which directly commercial relations between
possessors of not only products but also of productive instruments,
including land, prevailed. For the theory is also applicable to the pre-
ceding epochs before the appearance of the distinction between pri-
vate possessors due to the establishment of the foundations of the first
hierarchies in the family and gender relations. This error, that consists
in leaving to non-determinist explanations all that relates to genera-
tive and family phenomena, is altogether consonant with the restora-
tion of the linguistic element of the class dynamic; it always involves
toleration of the fact that decisive sectors of social life should be with-
drawn from the domain of the laws of dialectical materialism.
In a text expressly intended to criticize the Marxist interpretation
of history, and claiming that the latter is reduced (as unfortunately oc-
curs with some unwary and inexperienced followers of the commu-
nist movement) to deducing the developments of the political history
from the conflict between classes that participate in different ways in
economic wealth and its distribution, it is taken for granted that there
was a time when there was already a complete organization of the state
type and the social contest was not between classes of rich patrician
landowners, impoverished plebian peasants and artisans, and slaves,

58
because it was based on the authority of the father of the family.
The author of this text (DeVinscher, Property and Family Power
in Ancient Rome, Brussels, 1952) distinguishes two stages in the his-
tory of juridical systems: one, the most recent, responsible for the
well-known civil law that the modern bourgeoisie has embraced as
its own, providing for the free disposal of any object and “fee sim-
ple ownership”, whether in real property in land or property in other
goods, which we may call the “capitalist” stage, and another, much
older stage in which the civil administration and its legal codes were
very different, in that they largely prohibited instances of transfer and
sale except in cases where they were strictly regulated on the basis of
the family order, which was patriarchal. This was supposed to be a
“feudal” stage, if we contrast this feudalism and capitalism in the an-
cient world with respect to the characteristic feature that they con-
tained a social class that was lacking in the Medieval and Modern eras,
that of the slaves. The latter were excluded from legal rights because
they were considered to be things, rather than persons subject to law:
within the circle of free men, the citizens, a constitution based on the
family and on personal dependence preceded the later one that was
based on the free alienation of goods, in which the seller and the buyer
engaged with their mutual consent.
The author attempts to refute the “priority that historical mate-
rialism has clearly granted to the notions of patrimonial right in the
development of institutions”. This would be true if the base to which
historical materialism refers were the pure economic phenomenon of
property, to patrimony in the modern sense, and if, moreover, this
base did not embrace the entire life of the species and group and all
the discipline of its relations that had arisen from environmental dif-
ficulties, and above all the discipline of generation and family organi-
zation.
As everyone knows and as we shall see in Part 2, in the ancient
communities or phratries there was neither private property nor in-

59
stitutions of class power. Labor and production had already appeared
and this is the material base, which is much more extensive than the
one that is narrowly understood as juridical and economic in Marxist
terminology: we shall demonstrate that this base is bound up with the
“production of the producers”, that is, the generation of the members
of the tribe that is carried out with strict adherence to absolute racial
purity.
In this pure gens there is no other dependence or authority than
that exercised by the healthy and vigorous adult member of the tribe
over the young members who are trained and prepared for a simple
and serene life in society. The first authority arose in connection with
the first limitations imposed on sexual promiscuity, and this authority
was the matriarchy, in which the mother is the leader of the commu-
nity: but during this era there was not yet any division of the land
or anything else. The basis of such a division was created by the pa-
triarchy, which was at first polygamous and later monogamous: the
male leader of the family is a real administrative and military leader
who regulates the activity of the children and also of the prisoners
and that of the conquered peoples who became slaves. We are on the
threshold of the formation of a class state.
Once this point is reached it is possible to understand in broad
outlines the old Roman legal status, which lasted a millennium (Jus-
tinian definitively erased its last traces), the mancipium. People and
things were in the power of the pater familias: the wife or wives, the
children, who are free, the slaves and their offspring, the cattle, the
land and all the tools and provisions produced on it. All of these things
were at first only alienable by way of a rare and difficult procedure
called emancipatio, or if acquirable without payment, which form of
conveyance was called mancipatio. This is the source of the famous
distinction between res mancipii, inalienable things, and res nec man-
cipii, things that can be sold at will, which form part of the normal
patrimonium, things that are susceptible to increase or decrease.

60
 Thus, in the second stage, when there was no longer anything that
was res mancipii, and everything was an article of unrestricted com-
merce (between parties who are not slaves), economic value came to
prevail and it became obvious to everyone that struggles for politi-
cal power were based on the interests of opposed social classes, ac-
cording to the distribution of land and wealth; in the first stage, eco-
nomic value and patrimonial right as a license for free acquisition
were replaced by the personal imperium of the leader of the family,
whose prevailing form of organization recognized the three categories
of mancipium, manus, and patria potestas, which were the pivots of
the society of that epoch.
For the Marxist it is obviously an elementary error to assert that
in the first stage of relations economic determinism does not apply.
The mistake is based on the tautology that in the commercial order
everything proceeds between “equals” and that personal dependence
disappears to give way to the exchange between equivalents, in accor-
dance with the famous law of value. But Marxism precisely proves
that the unlimited and “Justinianian” commercial exchange of prod-
ucts and instruments led to a new and heavy yoke of personal depen-
dence for the members of the exploited and working classes.
Thus, many people opt to take the easy way out whenever the
question arises of a social relation that pertains to the family, since in
their view such a relation is supposed be explained not by way of the
productive economy but by so-called “emotional” factors, therefore
completely falling prey to idealism. The system of relations based on
generation and the family also arises in correspondence with the quest
for a better way of life for the group in its physical environment and
for its necessary productive labor, and this correspondence is found
within the laws of materialism just as when it addresses the later stage
of the separate exchanges between individual possessors of products.
But there can be no doubt that the Marxism that is unable to see
this succumbs to the idealist resurrection, by admitting if even for

61
only one second that in addition to the factors of economic inter-
est that are crystallized in the possession of private patrimony and in
the exchange of private goods (including among these exchangeable
goods human labor power), there are also other factors that are for-
eign to the materialist dynamic, such as sex, family affection, love; and
above all by falling victim to the insipid banality that these factors at
certain moments supersede and radically transform the factor of the
economic base by their superior forces.
Instead, it is only on the basis of the cornerstone of the efforts
to assure the immediate life of the species, which inseparably com-
bine the production of food and reproduction, subordinating if nec-
essary individual self-preservation to that of the species, that the vast
and exhaustive edifice of historical materialism is founded, which em-
braces all the manifestations of human activity including the latest,
most complex and grandiose ones.
We shall conclude this part with Engels (The Origin of the Family)
again, in order to show the customary fidelity of our school, and its
repugnance towards any kind of novelty. It is always the development
of the productive instruments that is found at the basis of the tran-
sition from the patriarchal imperium to free private property. In the
higher stage of barbarism, the social division of labor between artisans
and farmers, and the difference between city and country, had already
appeared. . . . War and slavery had already existed for quite some time:

“The distinction of rich and poor appears beside that of

freemen and slaves—with the new division of labor, a
new cleavage of society into classes. The inequalities of
property among the individual heads of families break
up the old communal household communities wherever
they had still managed to survive, and with them the com-
mon cultivation of the soil by and for these communi-
ties. The cultivated land is allotted for use to single fam-

62
 ilies, at first temporarily, later permanently. The transi-
tion to full private property is gradually accomplished,
parallel with the transition of the pairing marriage into
monogamy. The single family is becoming the economic
unit of society.”

Once again, the dialectic teaches how the individual family, that
presumed fundamental social value so highly praised by fideists and
enlightened bourgeoisie, which is linked to society based on private
property, is also a transitory institution, and denies that it has any
basis outside of its material determination—a basis that the fideists
and bourgeoisie, on the other hand, assert must be sought in sex or
love—and that the individual family will be destroyed after the vic-
tory of communism, now that its dynamic has already been studied
and condemned by materialist theory.

63
 Part II

The Marxist Interpretation of

the Political Struggle and of the
Impact of the National Factor in
the Historic Modes of
Production

64
1 From Race to Nation
The transition from the ethnic group or “people” to the “nation”
takes place in relation to the appearance of the political state, with
its fundamental characteristics such as the exclusive territory and the
organization of an armed force—and therefore after the end of prim-
itive communism and the formation of social classes.
Setting aside all literary movements and all idealist influences, we
refer to the category of race as a biological fact, and the category of
nation as a geographical fact. However, the nation as a historically de-
fined reality is one thing, and nationality is another, and by national-
ity we mean a group that derives from two factors, the racial and the
political.
Race is a biological fact, since, in order to classify a particular an-
imal according to its race, we do not ask ourselves where it was born,
but who were its parents, and if both parents (something that is very
rare in today’s world) were of the same ethnic type, the individuals
in question having been born to such parents would belong to that
type, and are classified precisely as a race. Those lovely pigs, which
have spread everywhere now, with a reddish color, known as York-
shires, so named after the county in England where they were orig-
inally bred and rigorously selected, which—the Pope is right about
this—can only be accomplished with beasts but not with humans, at
least when the latter, including both sexes, are not confined as was the
case with some types of slaves. The same is true of Breton cows, Dan-
ish dogs, Siamese cats, and so on; the geographic name only expresses
a fact related to the location where these varieties were originally bred.
Similar things happen to people, too, and today, in the United
States of America (apart from the blacks, since in some states of the
union “miscegenation” is still outlawed) one may also behold a Primo
Carnera, whose father and mother were Friulians, but who is an Amer-
ican citizen, and many Gennaro Espositos of Neapolitan blood, but

65
extremely proud of having obtained “a carta e’ citatino” [citizenship
papers].
The classification of men as members of a nation is carried out
according to a purely geographical, rather than biological or ethnic,
criterion, and depends on the place where they were born, generally
speaking, except in those rare and complicated cases of people born
onboard ships at sea and other similar instances.
But everywhere the difficult conundrum arises of nations that in-
clude more nationalities, that is, not just more races—which are grad-
ually becoming biologically indistinguishable as pure types—but more
groups that are distinguished by language and also by customs, habits,
culture, etc.
If we can still define as a “people” the nomadic horde formed by
the merger of tribes of a similar race that traversed whole continents
in search of lands to provide for their needs, and often invaded the
territories of other peoples who were geographically stable in order
to pillage them or to settle in them, obviously, until this last event
takes place, we have no right to apply to this horde the term “nation”,
which refers to a place of birth, which is unknown and a matter of
indifference to those who form part of a human mass that, with its
belongings and its wagons that constitute its main form of housing,
forgets the topography of its itinerary.
The concept of a fixed abode for a human group implies that of
the confines within which it limits its zone of residence and labor, and
the mainstream historian often says that it implies protection within
these confines against other groups, and therefore the established or-
ganization of guards and armies, a hierarchy, a power center. To the
contrary, however, the origin of hierarchies, of power, of the state,
is traceable to the increasing density of the human population, ulti-
mately leading to territorial disputes, and this trend proceeds in re-
lation to the internal processes of social groups, during the course of
their development from the first forms of the clan and the tribe, from

66
the moment when the cultivation of the soil and agricultural pro-
duction have reached the point of technological development where
farming is consistently practiced in seasonal cycles on the same fields.

2 The Emergence of the State

The premise of the origin of the state is the formation of social classes,
and the latter is determined in all peoples with the division of the
arable land among individuals and families and with the parallel phases
of the division of social labor and functions, from which is derived a
distinct position of the diverse elements with respect to general pro-
ductive activity, defining distinct hierarchies with functions such as
the primitive artisanate, military action, magic-religion (which is the
first form of technical science and of the school), a position that is in
turn separated from the immediate life of the gens and the primitive
family.
Here we must not attempt to recapitulate the Marxist theory of
the state in its entirety, but the latter is of the greatest interest for us
with regard to the task of establishing the identity of the structures
of the historical collectivities defined as the nation, structures which
are much more complex than the banal view according to which each
individual, taken in isolation, is united by way of a direct bond with
the land in which he was born, the nation being the totality of per-
sonal molecules that are similar to one another—a concept that is not
at all scientific and which is identified with the class ideology of the
modern ruling bourgeoisie.
The theory of the state that does not define the latter as an or-
gan of the people, of the nation or of society, but as an organ of the
class power of a particular class, fundamental in Marx, was integrally
restored by Lenin in the face of the systematic theoretical and polit-
ical deterioration to which it had been subjected by the socialists of

67
the Second International, and Lenin precisely based his restoration
on the systematic explanation of the origin of state forms contained
in the classic work by Engels on the origin of the family and of prop-
erty, which has served as our guide to pre-history. During that era the
ethnic element entered into play in a still pure and so to speak virgin
condition, within the primitive community, in order to work, frater-
nally and congenially in the ancient and noble—in the concrete sense
of the term—tribe and gens, an epoch that is spoken of by the myths
of all peoples with their fabulous tales of a golden age of the first men
who did not know crime or bloodshed.
From this brilliant work by Engels we shall once again grasp the
thread that must lead us to the explanation of national struggles, and
to the materialist conclusion that they do not comprise an immanent
factor, but a historical product that exhibits certain beginnings and
cycles, and which will conclude and disappear in the conditions that
are now fully elaborated in the modern world; this view of ours is
completely original and can by no means be identified with the refusal
to consider, in the framework of our doctrine and especially in our
action, which is inseparable from our doctrine (our doctrine, that is,
the doctrine that accords with our worldwide and century-old move-
ment, and not with one or many individual subjects), the extremely
important process of nationality, and much less with the monumen-
tal historical blunder of declaring it to be something that has already
been liquidated in its relations with the proletarian class struggle, in
the contemporary international political structure.
The process, with respect to ancient Greece, and therefore to the
highest historical form of the era of classical Mediterranean antiquity
that ended with the fall of the Roman Empire, is synthesized by En-
gels as follows:

“Thus in the Greek constitution of the heroic age we see

the old gentile order as still a living force. But we also see

68
 the beginnings of its disintegration: father-right, with
transmission of the property to the children, by which
accumulation of wealth within the family was favored
and the family itself became a power as against the gens
[compare this with the other quotation from the text
that appears at the end of Part 1]; reaction of the inequal-
ity of wealth on the constitution by the formation of
the first rudiments of hereditary nobility and monarchy;
slavery, at first only of prisoners of war, but already prepar-
ing the way for the enslavement of fellow-members of
the tribe and even of the gens; the old wars between tribe
and tribe already degenerating into systematic pillage by
land and sea for the acquisition of cattle, slaves and trea-
sure, and becoming a regular source of wealth; in short,
riches praised and respected as the highest good and the
old gentile order misused to justify the violent seizure of
riches. ..”3

The passage continues:

3 Bordiga’s note: We once again note that this adjective, “gentile”, must be un-

derstood to mean “belonging to the gens”, and is not to be confused with the less an-
cient concept of the aristocracy as a class: in the gens, which did not know classes, ev-
eryone is of the same blood and therefore equal; we shall not adopt the term democ-
racy, which is spurious and contingent, nor that of pancracy, because although the
first part of the word denotes “all”, the second part denotes “power”, something
that was unknown at the time: nor was it a pan-anarchy, because anarchy indicates
a struggle by the individual against the state, and therefore between two transitory
forms, and it is often the case that the latter form causes the wheel of history to roll
forward. In the gens there was a simple communist order, but one that was lim-
ited to a racially pure group, an order that was therefore ethno-communist, while
“our” communism, to which our historic program is oriented, is no longer ethnic
or national, but is the communism of the species, made possible thanks to the cycles
of property, power and the productive and commercial expansion that history has
traversed. . .

69
 “Only one thing was wanting: an institution which not
only secured the newly acquired riches of individuals against
the communistic traditions of the gentile order, which
not only sanctified the private property formerly so little
valued, and declared this sanctification to be the highest
purpose of all human society; but an institution which
set the seal of general social recognition on each new method
of acquiring property and thus amassing wealth at con-
tinually increasing speed; an institution which perpetu-
ated, not only this growing cleavage of society into classes,
but also the right of the possessing class to exploit the
non-possessing, and the rule of the former over the lat-
ter.
“And this institution came. The state was invented.”

And it was also Engels who defined the territorial criterion:

“In contrast to the old gentile organization, the state is

distinguished firstly by the grouping of its members on
a territorial basis. The old gentile bodies, formed and
held together by ties of blood, had, as we have seen, be-
come inadequate largely because they presupposed that
the gentile members were bound to one particular local-
ity, whereas this had long ago ceased to be the case. The
territory was still there, but the people had become mo-
bile. The territorial division was therefore taken as the
starting point and the system introduced by which citi-
zens exercised their public rights and duties where they
took up residence, without regard to gens or tribe.”

70
3 States Without Nationality
In the ancient Asiatic-Oriental empires that had been politically con-
solidated prior to the Hellenistic empires, we observe complete forms
of state power in relation to the concentration of enormous wealth in
land and goods in the hands of nobles, satraps and sometimes theocrats,
and the subjection of enormous masses of prisoners, slaves, serfs and
pariahs of the land, but one cannot yet speak of a national form even
though the characteristics of the state form are present: political ter-
ritory and armed forces.
The obvious objection that may be made with reference to the
Jewish People allows us an opportunity to contribute a useful clarifi-
cation of the last passage from Engels quoted above.
It might seem that confusion could arise between the territory
that in a less distant epoch defines the fully developed state form, and
the bond of the members of the gens to a particular territory, a bond
that was later broken even though the inviolable bond of blood itself
survived.
A territory belonged to the gens, but not in the modern politi-
cal sense, nor in a strictly productive economic sense, either. Engels
meant to say that the gens is distinguished from the other gentes, be-
sides by its name, by its territory of origin, not by the different succes-
sive territories of residence and common labor. The bond of the Iro-
quois Indian with his land of origin has been broken for centuries, not
only from the moment when white civilization rounded up the few
survivors in stupid reservations, but from the time when the various
lineages had engaged in terrible warfare with one another, destroying
each other but being very careful not to mix, even at the cost of travel-
ing thousands of kilometers through immense forests (many of which
were later reduced to deserts by capitalist technology, bourgeois phi-
lanthropy having used them to test atomic weapons).
The Jewish people were the first to possess a written history, but

71
by the time it was written it was a history of class division, featur-
ing landowners and dispossessed persons, rich people and servants,
clearly having surpassed the stage of primitive communism, whose
only memory is Eden, because already in the second generation we
have Cain, the founder and inventor of class struggle. The Hebrews
then had an organized state, very carefully organized, with precise hi-
erarchies and strict constitutions. This people did not, however, be-
come a nation, any more than their barbarian enemies the Assyrians,
the Medes or the Egyptians did. And this in spite of the enormous
difference between the racial purity of the Hebrews and the indiffer-
ence of the satraps and Pharaohs with respect to the swarms of ser-
vants, slaves and sometimes functionaries and military commanders
of other ethnic origins or colors who surrounded their thrones, and
their harems of white, black and yellow women, all the fruit of mili-
tary raids or the subjugation of free primitive tribes or of other states
that previously existed in the heart of Asia or Africa.
The Hebrews, divided into twelve tribes, were not assimilated by
other peoples, not even after they were defeated in war. The tribes and
gentile organizations, now traditionally transformed into monoga-
mous patriarchal families, did not lose the link of pure blood, the
name of their countries of origin or their tedious genealogical tradi-
tions (note that despite the strict adherence to paternal descent, the
Israelites fully tolerated conjugal unions with women of other races),
not even after the great deportations, as in the legendary Babylonian
and Egyptian captivities. The mythical bond with the promised land
is a pre-national form, because even when the ethnic community that
has been preserved in such a pure form returns to the country of its
origin, to its ethnological cradle, it cannot politically organize in that
country with any historical stability and the territory continues to be
invaded by armies coming from other distant powers. The wars of
the Bible are tribal struggles rather than wars of national liberation
or of imperial conquest, and the territory remained the scene of his-

72
toric clashes between peoples who aspired to hegemony in this strate-
gic area of the ancient and modern world.
Nor were the Greeks of the Trojan War a nation, but rather a fed-
eration of small states that were territorially adjacent and contained
ethnically diverse communities, in view of the different origins of Io-
nians and Dorians and the convergence on the Hellenic peninsula of
very ancient migrations coming from all points of the compass. Even
productive forms, state constitutions, customs, languages, and cul-
tural traditions varied widely among the small allied military monar-
chies: so, too, in the historic wars against the Persians, Greek unity
was only temporary, and subsequently gave way to bloody wars for
predominance over the Peloponnese and all of Greece.

4 The Hellenic Nation and Culture

National factors are nonetheless evident in ancient Greece in the so-
cial organization of Athens, Sparta and other cities, and even more
clearly in the Macedonian state that not only unified as a country but
rapidly became the center of one of the first imperial conquests in the
ancient world. The literature and the ideology of this first national-
ism would not only be translated in the Roman world, but would also
supply the script for the national intoxication of the modern bour-
geoisie.
The Lacedaemonian state, just like the Athenian state (or the The-
ban state), was not just a complete state in the political sense with a
precisely defined territory and its own juridical institutions, and with
a central power from which civil and military hierarchies emanated,
but attained the national form insofar as the social fabric—although
preserving the division between rich and poor classes with respect to
agricultural and artisanal production and the already highly devel-
oped domestic and foreign trade, and assuring the political power of

73
the economically powerful strata—allowed for a legal and adminis-
trative framework that applied the same formal norms to all citizens,
and among these norms was the equal participation in the votes of
the popular deliberative and elective assemblies. This juridical super-
structure substantially performed a function that is analogous to that
which Marxism denounced in the bourgeois parliamentary democ-
racies, but between these two historical modes of social organization
there is a basic difference: today anyone can be a citizen, and it is recog-
nized that the same law is valid for all; among the Greek city-states, the
citizenry, which alone comprised the real nation, excluded the class
of slaves, who were extremely numerous during certain periods, and
were deprived by law of any political and civil rights.
Despite such features, and despite the class conflict between aris-
tocrats and plebeians, between rich patricians and merchants on the
one hand and simple workers on the other, who lived on charity, this
social form was accompanied by several major advances both with re-
gard to labor and technology and therefore in the applied sciences,
and in pure science: in relation to participation in the productive pro-
cesses on foundations of equality and liberty, despite class exploita-
tion, language occupied a position of the first rank, and literature and
art reached very high levels, establishing the national tradition that
was utilized for the benefit of the leaders of society and the state to
bind all the citizens to the fate of the nation, forcing them to serve in
the military, and to make any other sacrifice or contribution in case of
danger to the national entity and its essential structures.
Literature, historiography and poetry fully reflect the assertion
of these values, making patriotism the main motor force of all social
functions, exalting by every means the fraternity of all the citizens of
the state, condemning the inevitable and frequent civil wars and in-
testine struggles, customarily presented as conspiracies against those
who hold power, promoted by other groups or persons who wanted it
for themselves, but which were actually nothing but the expressions

74
of the conflicts of class interests and the discontent of the popular
masses of the citizens who had been nourished on many illusions but
were tormented by the low standard of living even during the periods
of the greatest splendor of the “polis”.
National solidarity is not, however, a pure illusion and mirage cre-
ated by the privileged and the powerful, because in a determinate his-
torical phase it is the real effect determined by economic interests and
by the requirements of the material forces of production. The tran-
sition from primitive, localized farming in Greece—which despite its
favorable climate is largely arid and rocky, and which could only feed
a small, slightly developed population—to the most intense commer-
cial navigation from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, which
brought products from distant countries and disseminated those fab-
ricated by the Greek artisans who practiced an increasingly more var-
ied assortment of crafts that represented an authentic ancient type of
industry, and which in particular allowed the inhabitants of the ports
to undergo a major transformation in their ways of life, this transi-
tion, as we were saying, could not have taken place under a closed and
despotic state form, like the great empires of the continent, but only
under a democratic and open form, which not only supplied citizens
and helots, but skilled craftsmen for building the numerous merchant
ships, and the workers of the city, the armories and the administrative
labor oversight bodies, which were necessary—although on a much-
reduced scale compared to now—for this first form of capitalism that
achieved such unforgettable splendor.
Whenever new forms of labor appear and become established—forms
of labor which are, as always, subjected to exploitation, but which are
no longer bound by localized immobility and the fossilization of age-
old technologies of labor—they cause, during their ascendant phase,
in the superstructure, a vast development of science, art and architec-
ture, reflecting new ideological horizons opened up to societies that
had previously been bound to closed and traditional doctrines. Dur-

75
ing the waning of feudalism the phenomenon of the Renaissance ap-
peared, understood as a European event: many people think that the
golden age of the Greek period is culturally unsurpassable, but this is
nothing but literature. We may nonetheless point out that the “bridge”
of “national humanity” that spans economic inequalities, by exclud-
ing the slaves, who were considered as semi-animals and not as human
beings, was much more solid than the one that would be introduced
in its historical edition fifteen or twenty centuries later, and which
claims to have overcome the social abyss that divides the owners of
capital from the disinherited proletariat.
Engels reminds us that at the high point of the splendor of Athens,
the city contained only ninety thousand free citizens as opposed to
three hundred sixty five thousand slaves—who not only worked the
land but also supplied the workers for those industries we mentioned
above—and fifty thousand “freedmen” (ex-slaves) and foreigners who
did not enjoy the rights of citizenship.
It is quite plausible that this social structure provided the way of
life of these ninety thousand elect with a qualitatively more advanced
degree of “civilization” than the one that is granted to the modern
“free” peoples of contemporary capitalism, despite the greater resources
of the latter.
This does not, however, constitute a reason to participate in the
ecstatic admiration expressed for the Greek preeminence in thought
and in art, and not only because these great achievements were con-
structed on the blood and labor of a group of slaves that numbered
more than twenty times the number of free men: the free citizens, be-
fore the time of Solon, were so intensively exploited by a landowning
plutocracy that the terms of a mortgage could lead to the enslavement
of a free citizen who was declared to be an insolvent debtor, so that
the free citizenry, because it did not want to sink to the level of the
scorned slave (the pride of the free Athenians reached such a degree
that rather than become thugs they consented to allow the formation

76
of a state police corps staffed by well-compensated slaves, in which a
slave would be authorized to manumit free men), ultimately became
an authentic Lumpenproletariat, a stratum of the depths of poverty,
whose revolts against the oligarchs dissolved the glorious republic.
Engels made some comments that nicely encapsulate the Marx-
ist position with respect to apologetics for the great historical civi-
lizations. The Iroquois Indians were incapable of developing those
forms that had been attained by the original Greek gens, which was
totally in conformance with the gens studied in modern America by
Morgan (similar forms are described today in the newspapers by ex-
plorers of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, an expedition
carried out by Italians under the authority of the new Indian regime,
among primitive groups that were until recently isolated from the rest
of humanity). The Iroquois lacked a series of material conditions of
production relating to geography and climate that were available to
the Mediterranean peoples... Within the restricted circle of their real
economy, however, the Iroquois communists “did control their own
production”, which they determined and distributed in accordance
with human need.
With the impulse that took Greek production towards its glo-
rious differentiation, as represented by the Parthenon, the Venus of
Phidias or the paintings of Zeuxis, as well as the Platonic abstractions
that modern thought has yet to discard, the products of man that
were beginning to be transformed into commodities circulated through
monetized markets. Whether he was a free man or a slave according
to the canons of the codes of Lycurgus or Solon, man began to be the
slave of productive relations and to be dominated by his own prod-
uct. The tremendous revolution that will free him from these chains,
whose most formidable links were forged during the “golden” ages of
history, is still nowhere in sight.

“The Iroquois were still very far from controlling na-

77
 ture, but within the limits imposed on them by natu-
ral forces they did control their own production (...)
That was the immense advantage of barbarian produc-
tion, which was lost with the coming of civilization; to
reconquer it, but on the basis of the gigantic control of
nature now achieved by man (...) will be the task of the
next generations.”

Here one beholds the heart of Marxism, and here one sees why the
Marxist smiles when he sees some naive individual ecstatically admir-
ing one stage or another of human evolution, attributing the highest
honors in every domain to the work of sublime investigators, philoso-
phers, artists and poets, without regard to class and party interests,
as contemporary stupidity repeatedly says. We do not want to crown
“civilization”, but to knock it off its foundations.

5 The Roman Nation and Force

The factor of nationality reached its highest expression in ancient Rome
during the era of the Republic, further developing the model offered
by Greece for culture in the positive field of organization and law. On
the basis of the Roman nation the empire was erected, which tended
to be a single state organized throughout the entire known human
world of the time, but was unable to resist the pressure imposed by
the rapidly multiplying populations in distant and unknown lands
that had themselves entered into the great cycle of productive devel-
opment, which from the small gens had led the Mediterranean peo-
ples to an immense empire, and which was in turn subject to pres-
sure from the urgent material requirement of the vital spread of the
species.
The national process in Italy was unlike the one that took place in
Greece insofar as in Italy there were no little cities that were capitals of

78
little states, with their own customs and a high degree of productive
development that was largely shared equally by all of them, that were
fighting for hegemony over the peninsula. In Italy, after the disappear-
ance of the preceding civilizations which, although they had achieved
advanced types of production and had indisputably developed cer-
tain state powers, cannot however be considered to be nations in the
proper sense of the word, Rome became the exclusive center of a state
organization with certain well defined juridical, political and military
forms that rapidly absorbed the other communities and incorporated
an ever-expanding territory, rapidly extending beyond the borders of
Latium and reaching the Mediterranean and the Po. While the im-
portant productive forces of a zone of that enormous size were coor-
dinated with those of Roman society, the social and state organization
of Rome and its administrative and judicial systems were applied ev-
erywhere and in an increasingly uniform manner.
Although not as rapidly as in Greece, the agricultural productive
base was integrated, with a complex division of labor, with artisanal
production, commerce, maritime trade and manufacture: very soon,
however, the military conquest of lands beyond the Ionian and Adri-
atic Seas made it possible for the cultural and technical organization
that were features of Greek life and that of other peoples to be rapidly
absorbed.
The social system was substantially the same, with the contribu-
tion of slave labor always playing a leading role. But the spread of
mercantilism, more slow but more profound, caused the scale of dif-
ferences to be more marked even within the society of free men: at
the base of the social organization and of the laws themselves was the
census that classified the Roman citizens according to their wealth.
The Roman citizen was obliged to perform military service, while
weapons were absolutely forbidden to the slave and the freedman,
right up to the last years of the empire. The legionary army is the real
national army that Greece never possessed; Alexander the Great did

79
not have such an army, either, despite his impetuous advance to India,
where death finally halted the youthful commander, but this was ac-
tually the outermost limits allowed by the overwhelming superiority
of the western state form with respect to the ones that existed among
the various principalities of Asia. This so often assayed worldwide or-
ganization rapidly collapsed by being divided into smaller states, not
because there was not another Alexander, but because state central-
ism was still in its infancy.
The Roman organization, besides being a state organization, was
also a national one, both due to the direct participation of the cit-
izenry in war and to the establishment in every occupied zone of a
stable network of roads and fortifications, as well as the agricultural
colonization that took place at the same time, with the granting of
land to soldiers, and the immediate establishment of the Roman pro-
ductive, economic and legal forms. Roman expansion was not just
a raid aimed at seizing the putative treasures supposedly possessed
by legendary peoples, but the systematic dissemination of a partic-
ular mode of production that was constantly spreading, crushing all
armed resistance, but accepting the productive collaboration of the
subject peoples.
It is no easy matter, however, to establish Rome’s national bound-
aries, which varied with the passage of time, much less to attribute to
it an ethnographic profile, since everyone knows that from the racial
point of view prehistoric Italy, just like historic Italy, was never uni-
fied, nor could it ever have materially had any unity since it has been a
crossroads from the north and the south, the east and the west, for a
long succession of human groups since time immemorial. Even if we
were to admit that the primitive Latins (after they abandoned Troy)
constituted a single race, by the time they came to Latium their neigh-
bors the Volscians, Samnites, Sabines, not to speak of the mysterious
Etruscans, the Ligurians, etc., had been differentiated as separate peo-
ples for a very long time.

80
 The civis romanus with its laws and its proverbial national pride
rapidly spread from the Urbe throughout all of Latium, organizing
the Italic peoples by municipalities, to which, under the centralist
state form, no autonomy could be conceded, preferring instead, a few
centuries later, to call every free man who lived in them a Roman cit-
izen, with all the inherent rights and duties.
The national reality is here brought to its most potent expression
in the ancient world, accompanied by the greatest historical stability
known up to the present time. Very far removed, therefore, from the
ethnic community of blood, the members of this great community,
the free citizens, divided into social classes extending from the great
patrician latifundist with villas in every corner of the empire to the
poor peasant and proletarian of the Urbe who survived hard times
thanks to the distribution of grain by the state, were able to coex-
ist due to a general economic system of production and exchange of
goods and products, governed by the same inflexible legal code that
the armed force of the state caused to be respected without exceptions
throughout its immense territory.
The history of social struggles and civil wars within the Urbe is
classic, but the disorders did not reduce the solidarity and the ho-
mogeneity of the magnificent edifice constructed for the purpose of
administering all the productive resources of the most distant coun-
tries, filling these countries with enduring public works devoted to
productive functions of every type: roads, aqueducts, baths, markets,
forums, theaters, etc.

6 The Decline of Nationality

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire closed the period of an-
cient history when nationality and organization into national states
were decisive factors in the development of the evolution of the pro-

81
ductive forces.
National solidarity, which did not prevent periods of violent class
struggles between free men of different social and economic status,
had a clear economic base until, due to the masses of slaves, the devel-
opment of the system of production that was common to the citizens
of the nation provided a constant supply of new resources that raised
the general standards of living, such as the replacement of simple pas-
toral lifestyles with fixed agriculture, the application of irrigated hor-
ticulture to large-scale systems, and the replacement of primitive semi-
nomadic lifestyles by the division of the land and its subjection to
buying and selling just like slaves and cattle. The agrarian and subse-
quently urban economy of the Romans originally emerged from the
primitive collective economy of the local gentile institutions, which
was replaced because it could not feed a population that was rapidly
expanding, largely as a result, among other factors, of the good cli-
mate. Engels provides a brief but comprehensive explanation of these
origins, showing that the laws of the ancient Romans were derived
from their primitive gentile constitutions, and refuting the old theo-
ries Mommsen and other historians (see the final chapter of the pre-
ceding section where he refutes a recent author who denied that his-
torical materialism is applicable to that period).
If the system of Roman law governing the sale of land and com-
merce in movable goods represented the “necessary” superstructure
of a new productive economy with a greater output than primitive
tribal communism, and if this fact explains its appearance, the eco-
nomic facts that will explain the political and historical events of its
decline are different. Because of the increase in wealth obtained by
trading over an immense expanse and by exploiting slave labor, an ex-
tremely deep class divide emerged on the “national front”, which had
previously been so solidly united. The small farmers who had fought
for the fatherland and assiduously colonized conquered lands were
expropriated and dispossessed in ever increasing numbers, and the

82
slaves who formed part of the wealth of the landowners (at a higher
level than the flocks and herds) replaced them on their fertile fields,
plunging them into ruin. The coexistence of free men and slaves was
viable with a low-to-medium density of population, assuring the slaves
of their material life and reproduction, and assuring the free men of
the wide range of satisfactions offered by such flourishing eras; due to
the reduction in the amount of colonizable land beyond the borders
of Italy, however, and as a result of the new emigrant and demograph-
ically expanding peoples in motion on the other side of the borders,
and with an increasing number of people who aspired to own their
own parcel of land, an unavoidable crisis ensued in conjunction with
a regression in the methods of cultivation. The latter degenerated to
the point where neither animals nor slaves could be kept alive, and as
disorganization spread it was the owners themselves who freed their
slaves, who then went on to swell the masses of poor free men who
were without work or land.
This magnificent construction relaxed its bonds between regions
and could no longer intervene in local crises of subsistence. While
shortages were exacerbated by the demographic factor, human groups
were reduced to impoverished local economic circuits, narrow circuits
that were no longer those of the ancient gentile constitutions, and
whose situation could not be modified due to the profound changes
that had taken place and the new relations between productive instru-
ments, products and needs.... The nation that had become an empire
had to be divided into tiny units, which no longer had the powerful
connective fabric of the law, of the magistracy, of the armed forces,
that emanated from a single center, and lost the common Latin lan-
guage, the culture, the proud tradition... The great, “natural”, fun-
damental national and patriotic reality, which would be linked with
the famous “human essence” was, to the great discomfiture of the ide-
alists, preparing to allow itself to undergo a total historical eclipse that
would last a thousand years.

83
 “In earlier chapters we were standing at the cradle of an-
cient Greek and Roman civilization. Now we stand at its
grave. Rome had driven the leveling plane of its world
rule over all the countries of the Mediterranean basin,
and that for centuries. Except when Greek offered re-
sistance, all natural languages had been forced to yield
to a debased Latin; there were no more national differ-
ences (...) all had become Romans. Roman administra-
tion and Roman law had everywhere broken up the old
kinship groups, and with them the last vestige of local
and national independence (...) The elements of new
nations were present everywhere (...) But the strength
was not there to fuse these elements into new nations...”

The barbarians were coming, with the freshness of their gentile

structure, but they were not yet mature enough to create a state for-
mation by founding real nations. The shadow of the feudal Middle
Ages had appeared: and as Engels said, this too was a necessity inher-
ent to the development of the productive forces.

7 The Social Structures of the German

Barbarians
The peoples who brought an end to the Roman Empire with their
waves of invasions also originally possessed a gentile and matriarchal
organization, and a communist system of cultivation of the land. When
they first came into contact with Rome, they were between the mid-
dle and the higher stage of barbarism, and were beginning to make
the transition from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle. Their military
organization was beginning to give way to the formation of a class
of military chiefs who elected the king and who were accumulating

84
vast wealth, seizing the land from the free peasants, who were previ-
ously all members of the gens and the tribe, and thus free and of equal
status. The state also began to emerge among these peoples, and the
foundations were gradually laid that would lead many centuries later
to the modern rebirth of the nation.
The information available concerning the German peoples located
throughout Europe north of the Danube and east of the Rhine de-
picted them as having a system of agricultural production governed
in common by families, gentes and marks, followed by a type of oc-
cupation of the land characterized by its periodic redistribution with
the lands that were not totally held in common being set aside as fal-
low land for later cultivation. During this period, crafts and industry
were completely primitive: there was no commerce and no money cir-
culated, except for Roman coins in the border zones of the empire,
along with a certain quantity of imported manufactured goods.
All of these peoples were nomadic during the time of Marius, who
repelled the hordes of Cimbrians and Teutons from the Italian penin-
sula, which they were attempting to occupy be crossing the Po; many
of them were still nomadic during the time of Caesar, who observed
them on the left bank of the Rhine, and they are only described as
sedentary in the time of Tacitus, one hundred fifty years later. They
had evidently undergone a complicated process related above all to
their rapid population growth, but we lack primary historical docu-
mentation for this period: at the time of the fall of the Empire there
were six million of them, according to Engels, in an area that is now
home to about one hundred fifty million people.
The class distinctions between the military chiefs who possessed
land and power and the mass of peasant-soldiers (since there were no
slaves and therefore the only people who did not bear arms or were
exempt from the obligations of warfare were those who worked the
land) led to the formation of authentic states, as they occupied a fixed
territory and chose a stable king or emperor, even for life but not yet

85
hereditary in the context of a dynasty. Once this point was reached
the gentile order had already been overthrown, since the tradition of
the popular assembly of the community is completely altered in fa-
vor of the assembly of chiefs or noble electors, which constituted the
foundation of an openly class-based power.
This process was undoubtedly accelerated by the conquest of the
territories of the declining Roman Empire, in which the invading peo-
ples settled. Rather than its reorganization, their revolutionary task
was the destruction of the corrupt Roman Empire; as Engels said,
they liberated the subjects of Rome from their parasitic state, whose
socio-economic foundations collapsed, and the invaders obtained in
exchange at least two-thirds of the imperial territory.
The new organization of agricultural production in these lands,
in view of the relatively small numbers of the occupying forces and
their tradition of communist labor, left vast tracts unassigned, not
only of forests and pastures, but also cultivated lands, and the Ger-
man forms of law either prevailed over the Roman forms, or the two
forms existed side by side. This made possible a fixed territorial ad-
ministration of these nomadic peoples, and Germanic states arose that
for four or five centuries ruled the old Roman provinces and Italy it-
self. The most important of these states was that of the Franks, which
served as a defensive rampart against the occupation of Europe by the
Moors, despite yielding some territory to pressure from the Normans,
and thus enabled populations to remain in the territories they occu-
pied, forming a complex ethnic mixture of Germans, Romans and,
in the kingdom of the Franks, the indigenous Celts. These Germanic
states were not nations, however, due to this recent crowding together
of heterogeneous ethic types, traditions, languages and institutions:
but they were states because they finally had stable borders and a uni-
fied military force.

“And, further, however unproductive these four centuries

86
 appear [the 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th centuries A.D.], one
great product they did leave: the modern nationalities,
the new forms and structures through which west Eu-
ropean humanity was to make coming history [the 17th,
18th and 19th centuries]. The Germans had, in fact, given
Europe new life, and therefore the break-up of the states
in the Germanic period ended, not in subjugation by the
Norsemen and Saracens, but in the further development
of the system of benefices and protection into feudal-
ism. . . ”

Before we conclude this part of our text with the description of

the features of the medieval constitution, in which the “national” fac-
tor is substantially excluded, we want to point out that in the classic
Marxist doctrine not only is the organization of the ancient barbar-
ian and nomadic gentile constitutions into states considered to be a
historically positive development, which benefited the peoples of the
Mediterranean peninsulas for more than one thousand years, but so is
the development of the national character of these states, their devel-
opment in the direction of nationality, that is, towards a community
that is circumscribed not just by certain racial characteristics, but also
by the language and traditions and customs of all the inhabitants of an
extensive and stable geographic territory. While the historical idealist
sees in nationality a general fact that is always and everywhere present
wherever there is civil life, the Marxists attribute it to particular cycles.
We have recounted the history of the first historical cycle, and it was
that of the great national democracies “superimposed” on the masses
of slaves, but with free men divided into social classes. We shall dis-
cuss the second cycle in Part 3, that of the democracies of free men,
now without human slaves. In this second historical cycle the reality
of the nation accompanies a new class division: that of capitalism. The
nation and its material influence are perfected in capitalism and bour-

87
geois democracy, but not before, since the formation of nation states
will be indispensable so that the passage to modern capitalism in the
various geographic areas may be accomplished.

8 Feudal Society as Non-national

Organization
The economic relations that define the feudal order explain how the
feudal type of production led to the origin of a specific correspond-
ing historical form of the political state, but one lacking a national
character.
To explain how the encounter between two such heterogeneous
types of production—the agrarian community of the barbarian peo-
ples and the regime of private landed property of the Romans—led
to the feudal system that is in turn based on agrarian production, and
to emphasize the Marxist conclusion that the states of classical antiq-
uity, above all in their best periods, had a national character, which
would be lacking in the medieval order, it is necessary to recall the
most noteworthy characteristics of their respective relations of prop-
erty and production.
In the barbarian order, until slavery appeared, the farmer was a
free member of the community, but the land was not subdivided in
individual parcels nor was any part of it set aside for individual con-
sumption, nor were agricultural products regulated, harvested and
consumed in accordance with individual control.
In the classical order of antiquity, the agricultural worker was es-
sentially the slave, and slavery prevailed not just in agriculture but
also in the already highly developed and differentiated sector that pro-
duced manufactured goods, which is why it is correct to state that
the Greco-Roman world had an authentic industrialism and in a cer-
tain sense a real capitalism: capital, instead of being constituted by the

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land and the instruments of production was formed above all by liv-
ing men, while today, for example, in an enterprise the land, the ma-
chines and the draft animals are capital. This ancient capitalism did
not have generalized wage labor as a corresponding term, since it was
rare for a free man to work for a wage.
Because the slaves, however, who constituted the fundamental la-
bor force of society (perhaps at first they were the common property
of all the free men), were goods that could be owned, their distri-
bution was unequal and this resulted in the division of the category
of free men into two classes: citizens who owned slaves, and citizens
without slaves, without property in men. It seems that even the wise
Socrates himself aspired, in his impoverished status as a philosopher,
to buy at least one slave boy.
The citizen without slaves was therefore incapable of living on the
labor of others, and so he had to work. He did not work like a slave, of
course, but like a free man, that is, without taking orders from a mas-
ter. And for this reason he had to participate in the regime of landed
private property. The free worker is a landowning peasant who dis-
poses of his piece of land according to his wishes, obtaining products
with the labor of his own two arms. Other free men who were not
rich and who did not own slaves engaged in free craft labor or the lib-
eral professions (which were not conceded, at least as an intellectual
activity, to slaves).
When this cycle is complete all the arable land is reduced to an al-
lodial good. The allod is private property in the land, with full rights
to sell it or to buy other land. This means that the new land that
was conquered by Rome was immediately divided among the victori-
ous (Roman) soldiers who became colonists. For allodial rights to be
freely exercised, however, it is necessary for circulating money to exist
with which various products can be purchased, including the slaves
normally associated with the possession of land.
The few goods that were not distributed in the ancient regime by

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way of parcelized individual ownership and remained in the hands of
the state or of local administrative entities comprised, as opposed to
allodial goods, the public domain. The fact that the private allodium
predominated over the public domain required the existence of a cir-
culating medium, and therefore of a general market to which all the
free citizens of the entire territory could have access: this condition
was completely fulfilled in Greece and Rome. The type of produc-
tion of classical antiquity therefore presented, for the first time, unlike
the system of production under barbarism with its restricted circles of
labor-consumption, a domestic national market (and also the begin-
nings of an international market). The territorial state is a national
state not only when its power reaches the whole territory by way of
armed force (as was also true of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and later of
the Salian Franks and the Burgundians, etc.), but also when the trade
in the products of its labor and of goods extends throughout its entire
territory and between the most distant points of that territory. In the
juridical superstructure this is expressed by the exercise of the same
rights on the part of the citizenry in all parts of the state. Only then is
the state a nation. In the framework of historical materialism, a nation
is therefore an organized community in a territory in which a unified
domestic market has been formed. Corresponding to this historical
result is a parallel degree of community of blood, and even more of
language (you cannot do business without speaking!), of habits and
customs. . .
The classical economic environment gave birth to the phenomenon
of accumulation, as also takes place in modern capitalism: we then
find those who have many slaves and those who have none, those
who have a lot of land and those who hardly have enough to till with
their bare hands. This concentration led to destructive results and
transformed slave labor into an economically counterproductive fac-
tor as the land was relentlessly being divided into smaller and smaller
parcels. In this context and with these relations in mind Pliny wrote

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that “latifundia Italiam perdidere” [“the latifundia are the ruination
of Italy”], and in the superstructure of morality the enslavement of
man became an infamy... Contemporary compilers of agrarian laws
actually went so far, with regard to aspects of technological and so-
cial development, to identify slavery with the odium of capitalist ex-
ploitation of agricultural labor. But let us return to our examination
of Medieval agricultural labor.
With the collapse of the Roman agrarian economy that had be-
come technologically retrograde and unproductive, the general fabric
of commerce by which movable wealth circulated throughout the en-
tire empire also collapsed, and the range of all types of needs of the
population that could be satisfied also contracted. The barbarians,
however, arrived with a tradition of not being such big consumers,
and for them, after the brief hiatus of the dissipation of the loot they
obtained in the cities, which went into decline at this time, the real
wealth that they had conquered was the land. But they were too late,
since the social division of labor was already too highly advanced for
all the land seized from the Roman landowners and latifundists to be
worked in common, or managed as part of the public domain of the
new powers. What emerged was a mixed type of allodial and public
domain lands. Part of the land was appropriated for the common use
of the communities (civic customs that have survived to this day), and
another part was definitively divided in an allodial form, which was
completely precarious in the period when new waves of conquerors
were constantly arriving, and another part was shared out by way of
periodic redistributions (even today this institution of re-allotment of
the land has survived in cadastral legislation, in Austria, for example).
The free peasants who took possession of the much desired and
fertile Mediterranean lands would rapidly obtain greater yields than
the gangs of slaves. And in this context the productive forces of so
many previously unused arms and of the rich terrain scorned by the
wealthy Romans underwent a powerful resurgence. Because of the

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collapse of the Roman administrative network with its communica-
tions and means of transport, however, trade collapsed as well, re-
gressing into a type of local production characterized by the direct
local consumption of the product.
This economy without commerce characterized the Middle Ages,
whose states possessed legal systems and territorial armies, but did not
have united territorial markets: as a result, they were not nations.
If the members of the old gentile institutions had already lost
their social equality during the course of the migrations and conquests,
they would soon also lose, together with the semi-common and semi-
allodial control of the occupied lands, their liberty and their auton-
omy as well. The process entailing the concentration of territorial prop-
erty into the hands of military chiefs, functionaries, favorites of the
king’s court, and religious bodies had commenced.
The slaves of antiquity were replaced by a new class of serfs, who
did all the manual labor themselves, above all, the robbery and extor-
tion of the free laborers. Farming land that was divided into many
parcels presupposed a stable order, which in the Roman state was
guaranteed by its judges and its soldiers, but which now was lack-
ing not only because new armed peoples frequently came to the fer-
tile lands, but also because struggles broke out between the lords and
chieftains of a single ineffectively centralized power.
The free peasant needed security more than freedom, since secu-
rity was the basic element of the Roman juridical order, which was
now rehabilitated and held up as a model. By surrendering his free-
dom he found security, or at least a better chance of cultivating the
land for himself and not for other predatory elements, who deprived
him of his tools and equipment along with his entire harvest.
This form was known as commendation (and not recommenda-
tion as some texts call it), which is basically nothing but an agreement
between the peasant farmer and the armed and warlike lord. The feu-
dal lord guaranteed stability in the territory where the labor was per-

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formed, and the peasant handed over to him part of his crop or else
part of his labor time. But the security of not being expelled from the
land he farmed was transformed into the obligation not to leave it.
He was no longer a slave, who could be sold, but he was not a free
peasant, either: he was the serf of the glebe.

9 The Bases of the Modern Revolution

The defense waged by Engels on behalf of this form as opposed to lati-
fundist slavery is completely Marxist. The new form allows, for exam-
ple in the France of the semi-savage Celts, an enormous development
of productivity and an enormous increase in the stable population, so
that the periodic famines (the consequence of the abolition of trade
between regions and provinces) and the Crusades (an attempt to re-
open the trade routes of antiquity) did not reduce this population
two centuries later.
Thus, the revolution that accompanied the fall of the Roman Em-
pire at the hands of the barbarian migrations served the further devel-
opment of the social productive forces.
The destruction of general commerce and of the markets that once
embraced the furthest reaches of nation and empire condemned the
newly-fertilized and colonized Europe to a very long period of molec-
ular economic life, its populations dispersed and reduced to tiny is-
lands, a Europe that still was the home of stable peoples who grad-
ually became culturally and technologically more advanced, an ad-
vance that corresponded with the organization of the countries that
were consistently occupied by humans, although the class that at that
time formed the vast majority of the population, the class of the serfs
bound to the glebe, was excluded from any social advancement.
As Fourier had so felicitously intuited, however, while the slaves
of antiquity had not engaged in any real victorious liberation strug-

93
gles, for the European peoples the basis of a distant but formidable
revolutionary uprising against the ruling classes and institutions of
the feudal epoch had been prepared.
While the modern urban proletariat was making its appearance
in history, the national demand was the main cause of this immense
revolution, and was conducive to the liberation of the modern citi-
zen from the chains of his servitude by situating him at the level of
the ancient citizen. If the modern bourgeois revolution literally uses
and abuses the echo of the Greco-Roman glories — “qui nous délivr-
era des Grecs et des Romains?” — it is nevertheless true that it was a
revolutionary ferment with a gigantic force.
The national revolution and its demand are not ours, nor do they
mean the conquest of an irrevocable and eternal benefit for man. But
Marxism observes it with interest, and even with admiration and pas-
sion, and when it arose in history, in decisive moments and locations,
it participated in this struggle on its side.
It is necessary to study the degree of development of the cycles,
identifying the crucial places and moments. If one thousand years
have transpired between the development of the primitive Mediter-
ranean peoples and those of continental Europe, the termination of
the modern national cycle in the West could be said to have been ac-
complished, but from the revolutionary point of view, the cycle of the
peoples of other races remains open and will continue to remain open
for a long period, with its own different cycles and continents. And
this is above all why it is so important to shed light, in a Marxist and
revolutionary sense, upon the role of the national factor.

94
 Part III

The Movement of the Modern

Proletariat and the Struggles for
the Creation and
Self-Determination of Nations

95
1 Feudal Obstacles to the Emergence of
Modern Nations
The organization of feudal society and its state posed an obstacle to
the bourgeois drive towards the formation of the modern unitary na-
tion due to its decentralized nature in a horizontal and vertical sense.
While each one of the recognized “orders” possessed its own rights
and to a certain extent was forbidden to intermarry with other orders
and thus constituted quasi-nations, the feudal domains, for their part,
because they were characterized by a closed economy with respect to
the force of human labor power, caused the groups of serf workers to
form small unfree nations.
Picking up where we left off at the end of Part 2 of this study on
the history of the classical nation and its fate after the fall of the Ro-
man Empire, the barbarian invasions and the formation of the me-
dieval states, it would not be a bad idea to enumerate those aspects of
feudalism that militated against the historical reemergence of the na-
tion. The nation, then, is a geographic circuit within which economic
traffic is free, the positive law is common for all, and to a great extent
there is an identity of race and language. In the classical sense, the na-
tion excluded the masses of slaves and included within these relations
only the free citizens; in the modern, bourgeois sense, the nation in-
cludes all those who were born in it.
If, prior to the first great Greco-Roman historic stage, we found
states that were not nations, and if we once again find such states af-
ter this stage and before the bourgeois stage, we never find a nation
without a state. Our entire materialist analysis of the national phe-
nomenon is therefore based at every step on the Marxist theory of
the state, and the latter is the difference between the bourgeoisie and
us. The formation of nations is a real physical fact like any other, but
once the nation is united as a state, it always appears divided into so-
cial classes, and the state is not an expression — as the bourgeoisie say

96
— of the whole nation as an aggregate of persons, or even of munici-
palities or districts, but is the expression and the organ of the interests
of the economically ruling class.
At this point we have confirmed the truth of two theses: national
unity is a historical necessity and is also the precondition, along with
the unitary domestic market, the abolition of the estates, and positive
law that is the same for all subjects of the state, for the future advent of
communism; and the centralized state not only does not exclude the
class struggle but causes the class struggle against it to rise to its highest
pitch, just as it accentuates the international nature of this struggle in
the arena of the socially developed world.
The economy of feudal society was predominantly agrarian. The
members of the aristocratic order divided the possession of all the
land not only with regard to its topographic boundaries, but above
all to establish their personal domination over groups of the peas-
ant population. Due to their privileges the nobles formed, in a cer-
tain sense, a “nation”: they did not intermarry with serfs, artisans or
bourgeoisie, and they possessed their own laws and judges belonging
to their own order. Their hereditary possession of the land in its pure
form was not alienable, and was ruled by a title or investiture granted
by the higher feudal hierarchy and ultimately, within certain limits,
by the king. The bearing of arms was the privilege of this order just
like the prerogatives of command; when it was necessary to mobilize
large armed contingents, the latter were composed of mercenaries and
were often recruited from other countries.
The class of serfs did not form a nation, not only because it did
not have any central representation or expression, but also because
it was reproduced in closed circles that were kept separate from each
other; it was legally subservient to the lord and the legal codes var-
ied according to the zones or the opinions of the lords. The physical
boundary for the serf was not the state frontier nor was he under the
jurisdiction of the central state power, since both frontiers and power

97
were encompassed by the fief of his immediate lord.
Now we must speak of the ecclesiastical order, which at various
stages was very closely aligned with the power of the aristocratic or-
der. But the ecclesiastical order was not a nation and did not define
a nation, because it was incapable of genealogical continuity due to
the celibacy of the priests as well as the fact that its boundaries were
extra-national. The Catholic Church, as its name indicates, is interna-
tional, or, more precisely, in its organizational and doctrinal features it
is international and interracial. This particular superstructure was the
product of an economy based on closed units. The serf was the only
element that provided labor power, and he consumed part of it in the
form of a fraction of the products of the land: local needs were limited
in such a way that they were supplied by locally manufactured prod-
ucts, with a completely embryonic division of labor, and the first arti-
sans were barely tolerated (those very famous artisans who, while the
peasants inhabited their lands in isolation, were concentrated in the
“burg” at the foot of the lord’s castle, and who were later to become
the terrible, destructive and revolutionary bourgeoisie). The lord and
his small crew of henchmen consumed the quota brought by the peas-
ants to the castle, or which was produced by the corvée labor of the
peasants on the lord’s own estate. It is clear that, since a small, priv-
ileged minority exercised control over a large quantity of products,
their needs gradually increased and therefore so did their demand for
manufactured articles, even if the little princesses still ate with their
hands and changed their shirts only on special occasions.
This was the origin of the material conflict, the starting point of
that whole immense struggle that would invoke the high-sounding
words, Fatherland, Liberty, Reason, Criticism, and Idealism against
the feudal obstacles to the free circulation of persons and things, and
the demand for domestic freedom of trade throughout the entire state,
and then for universal freedom of trade, that would allow the lord to
enjoy his wealth, but would also whet the appetites of the merchants

98
who would one day proceed to buy with money the sacred and so
avidly sought feudal lands: those who deluded themselves that they
were gaining a fatherland, would instead obtain within the confines
of the state a single currency, a stock exchange, and a unified system
of tax collection, conditions that would make possible the eruption
of capitalist productive forces.

2 Feudal Localism and Universal Church

In medieval society the productive and economic base was not na-
tional but sub-national, with respect to sites of labor and locations
of markets. The linguistic, cultural, scholastic, and ideological super-
structure was not national because it was concentrated around the
Roman Christian Church, with a universal dogma, ritual and orga-
nization. But the power of the Church did not extend so far as to
overcome feudal particularism, since the Church strictly supported
the interests and enactments of the landowning nobility.
The classical nations had already attained the unity of personal
and commercial law within their political frontiers, because agrarian
production, which was also fundamental at that time, made it possi-
ble to amass commodities and money thanks to the labor of the slaves,
and also thanks to the overwhelming inequality that existed, which
was not only permitted but tolerated by Roman law, with regard to
the number of slaves that were possessed by free citizens, as was also
the case with the allodial possession of the land.
After the suppression, clarified in the light of determinism, of
this slave type of production, the road to the general flow of man-
ufactured commodities would be opened up by another means—the
bourgeoisie—and their production would be carried out in tandem
with the development of agriculture, only to enormously—and irra-
tionally—surpass it in the capitalist epoch.

99
 But with Rome the classical nation had become more than just a
nation; it was a territorial political universe with an organized power
that extended throughout the entire non-barbarian world.
The ineluctable crisis of this mode of production, which had led
to fantastic levels of accumulation favored by state centralism and its
dictatorship over the provinces, and by the concentrated ownership
of land and slaves in the hands of a few super-powerful rich people,
had facilitated for the invading barbarians the task of reducing this
immense unitary organization into fragments.
In the Middle Ages this universalism was attained under a very
different form, in the powerful organization of the Christian Church
of Rome. We shall not pause here to examine in detail the great his-
torical process, which can be grasped in the light of the same social
tendencies, relating to the Eastern Empire that survived for centuries
after the fall of the Western Empire, and which, although it was ca-
pable of diverting the Germanic attack from the northwest was inca-
pable of repeating this achievement with regard to the Asians from
the southeast, leading, by way of essentially analogous paths, to the
fragmentation of a unity that had long been merely symbolic.
In Western Europe the need to develop general commercial ex-
change in opposition to the feudal parcelization of the land took the
form of a demand to reconstruct centralism, which had given the clas-
sical Roman world a degree of power, wealth and wisdom that seemed
beyond the reach of the feudal states. But the response to this demand
could not be that of the “Guelphs”, who opposed the German Em-
pire of the time and its bellicose ruling class with the international in-
fluence of the Church, even though this was attempted in the midst of
the imperial conflict with the class forces of the first citadels of the new
bourgeois class: the Italian cities, ruled by master craftsmen, artisans,
bankers and merchants, who had already made inroads throughout
all of Europe.
The Church in fact constituted in all the states that arose from

100
the dismemberment of the Empire—after the first centuries of resis-
tance—a common superstructure that served the power of the feudal
lords and their monarchs. Precisely because they were not national so-
cieties, the functions this superstructure performed transcended the
limits of their political borders. National languages spoken by the
“people”, or “the common folk”, did not yet exist. The language of
the priests in all parts of feudal Europe was Latin, while the masses
of the serfs spoke dialects that were incomprehensible to people liv-
ing ten or twenty kilometers away, so that one could not travel to find
work or money, but only to fight, and this is why they rarely needed
a common tongue. Latin, however, was not just the language of reli-
gious ritual, which was of little importance, but was the only existing
cultural vehicle, practically the only language that could be read and
written everywhere.
Latin, and only Latin, was taught to the members of the noble
order, and this means that education, assimilated by the Church, re-
mained an inter-state structure, even though members of other classes
were admitted, and besides the “young lords” and the future priests
and friars, a few children of the bourgeoisie of the cities were also
allowed to attend school, but the dispersed peasants (and this situ-
ation has not yet been totally overcome today, in some unfortunate
provinces of nations as noble as ... Italy and Yugoslavia!) were abso-
lutely excluded.
It was through this unitary sieve that all high culture passed—the
same topics and texts were discussed in Bologna, Salamanca, Paris and
London—but so did the practical culture itself and, ultimately, this
is where the entire bureaucratic, civil, judicial and military element
came from: any class that possessed a culture, possessed some kind of
“national culture” in only the vaguest sense, and only after the year
one thousand did “national literatures” emerge.
The bourgeoisie themselves adapted to everything and paid their
tribute to this social nexus, which is a superstructure of the dominant

101
type of production, but at the same time it is an inevitable means of
labor, and while the banker did business with Amberes or Rotterdam
from Florence, he did so by way of a commercial correspondence in
Latin, even though this Latin summarily butchered the resurrected
Caesar and Cicero; no less than the Latin used in the Mass.
The entire Catholic ideological structure, however, despite the scale
of this edifice that went far beyond the differences of blood, race and
language that separated men, is historically bound to the defense and
preservation of the feudal type of servitude. This collaboration began
from below with the collaboration of the priest and the local lord,
who shared the tithes and taxes from the exploited peasantry, whose
status as subjects was strictly connected with their bond to the soil
and to the fief where they were born. On the other hand, monastic
communities and the major religious orders, although not without a
struggle with the lords, possessed vast tracts of land under the form
of a productive relation that was completely identical with the feu-
dal form, both of which shared the requirement that this possession
of land, bodies and souls was inalienably bound to the title, aristo-
cratic on the one hand and ecclesiastical-hierarchical on the other, to
the land.

3 Universalism and Political Centralism

Although in Italy the first struggles of the bourgeoisie, organized in
small city-republics but still incapable of creating an inter-regional
economy, were supported by the Papacy and the Guelphs, Dante an-
ticipated the modern bourgeois forms by invoking the monarchy as
the first historically possible form of centralized state, although he did
not expressly formulate a true national policy due to his Ghibelline
universalism that postulated a single European power.
When Dante wrote his treatise De Monarchia, he adopted the

102
Ghibelline position, despite the fact that his family supported the Guelphs.
In the theory of history expressed by Dante the demand for a united
central power is fundamental, and the sterile battles between munic-
ipal families and feudal lords is rejected. The new demand for univer-
salism rested on the formidable tradition of the Roman Empire, re-
jecting and combating the universalism of the Catholic Rome; this is
why Dante condemned the political power and policies of the papacy
and invoked the German Emperor as the great monarch who would
unify all of Europe in one centralized state: Germany and Italy, and
then France and the other countries.
Should we include Dante’s political doctrine in the Medieval pe-
riod because it does not contain the essential bourgeois demand of
separate nationalities, or to the contrary do we perceive it as an an-
ticipation of the modern bourgeois era? We must obviously choose
the latter viewpoint. The institution of the absolute monarchy arose,
in the midst of the Middle Ages, as the only form of centralized state
that could effectively engage in the struggle against the federalism of
the feudal lords and their pretensions to local self-government. At the
side of these centrifugal forces one also finds the obscurantism of the
clergy and of Rome; meanwhile, the great royal courts—a brilliant ex-
ample of which, that of Frederick II of Swabia in Palermo, is lauded by
Dante—cleared the way for the new productive forces and for com-
merce, and therefore the support of the arts and the exchange of ideas
outside the scholastic dictatorship. The Swabian king was not exactly
a national king, but the accounts of his atheism, culture and interest
in art are not entirely legendary, and it is certainly true that he was the
founder of the first industries and manufacturing enterprises, precur-
sors of the social forms that were alien to the retrograde ignorance of
the aristocracy, which was expert only in the use of arms. The first
form that capitalism mobilized against the old regime of landowners
was the central monarchy with its court in a great capital city, where
artisans, artists and men of knowledge opened up new horizons for

103
material life.
The Latin treatise De Monarchia is one of the first ideological
manifestations of this modern demand and is in this sense revolu-
tionary, anti-feudal and anti-Guelph: the anti-clericalism of the fu-
ture would make extensive use of the invectives of this great poem
directed against the papacy. And if the straightforward national de-
mand is not explicit in Dante, and if he foresees an Italy that is po-
litically united, despite the feudal lords, but only as a province of the
transalpine Empire, this is because in Italy the modern bourgeoisie
was born early, but with a municipal and local character, which did
not diminish the importance of this first manifestation of the living
forces of the future, but it was socially subjugated, due to reasons in-
herent to the change in the geographic routes of the nascent system of
commercial exchange, before the vision of a powerful united capitalist
state within national boundaries could be conceived. This did not de-
tract from the fact that it was in this country that Dante himself chose
to write literature in the vulgar Italian language, paving the way for
the decisive dissemination of the Tuscan dialect in competition with
the one hundred dialects that extended from those of Lombard origin
to those influenced by the Saracens.

4 The Revolutionary Demands of the

National Bourgeoisie
According to the Marxist interpretation of history each period of tran-
sition from one mode of production to another witnesses on the one
hand the mobilization of the ruling class to defend its economic privi-
leges by means of the employment of the apparatus of power and the
influence of its traditional ideologies, and on the other the struggle
of the revolutionary class against these institutional and ideological
interests. This revolutionary class, in a more or less well-defined and

104
comprehensive manner, engages in a propaganda campaign featur-
ing new ideologies within the old society, new ideologies that contain
the consciousness of its own conquests and of the future social mode
of production. The modern bourgeoisie developed particularly inter-
esting and suggestive systems, which constituted veritable weapons
of struggle, in the different European nations, and all these systems
revolved around the great demand for national unity and indepen-
dence. The beginning of the modern age and the end of the medieval
era is situated by the history textbooks either in 1492 or 1305. The first
date is that of the discovery of America, and is significant in the his-
tory of the bourgeoisie—a truly epic saga of bourgeois history is of-
fered by Marxism, from the incomparable synthesis of the Manifesto
to the other classical descriptions—as the date that marks the open-
ing up of the transoceanic routes, the formation of the fabric of the
world market, and of the awakening of extremely powerful forces of
attraction that, in the form of demand for manufactured commodi-
ties, drove the advanced white race to the war of overproduction. And
in parallel with this powerful development, the center of the vigorous
growth of industry shifted, and it shifted precisely from north-central
Italy to the heart of extra-Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe.
1305, on the other hand, is the date when Dante wrote the Com-
edy, and at that time in Italy the demands of the anti-feudal and anti-
ecclesiastical revolution had already made much headway, although in
a very limited geographic area. Because Roman traditions had orig-
inated within the peninsula, and however much the contributions
of new barbarian blood may have had an impact, the organizational
forms of the Germanic peoples encountered major resistance in Italy
and the feudal regime never really attained a high degree of develop-
ment there.
Because of the advantages of its location amidst navigable seas,
Italian trade and exchange rapidly recovered by establishing the di-
vision of labor on new foundations. Although the municipal system

105
had collapsed with the rise of petty local lords and hereditary auto-
cratic monarchies, agrarian serfdom did not, however, become pre-
dominant, and a large part of the population continued to be com-
posed of independent peasants and artisans and small- and medium-
scale merchants. For these same reasons, the bourgeoisie did not emerge
as a national class during this period, a transition that would only take
place several centuries later on a larger scale. Because of the setback
it suffered in Italy, the capitalist revolution was postponed for a long
time, but in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries it was victorious in Eng-
land and France, and subsequently in Central Europe.
In this way the appearance of a new mode of production, limited
to a restricted circle, would fail and therefore have to wait for several
more generations to reemerge. Its historical recovery, however, would
take place within a much more extensive circuit. This is why we must
not lose sight of the fact that the communist revolution, crushed in
1871 in France, had to wait until 1917 to attempt to conquer not just
France but all of Europe; and now that it has been defeated and de-
prived of all significance, as occurred to the limited bourgeois revolu-
tion of the Italian cities, it will be able to reemerge after a long period,
on a world scale, and not just in the zones occupied and controlled by
the white race.
In the period between the 12th and the 15th centuries, it might ap-
pear that the demands for the equality of citizens before the law, po-
litical liberty, parliamentary democracy and a republic were illusions
that had been dissipated by history, but their force only increased due
to an important historical advance on a European scale that seems
quite obvious to us today. Actually, it is only in appearance that the
demands of the modern proletariat for the violent overthrow of the
democratic capitalist state, the dictatorship of the working class and
the destruction of the economy based on money and wage labor, have
been dormant and forgotten.
Throughout this entire period the bourgeois classes and groups,

106
wielding greater influence due to the changes in the productive forces
and techniques and the rise of mercantile exchange, never ceased to
proclaim at every opportunity the new demands by fighting for them,
until they succeeded in a totalitarian manner in smashing the feudal
order and imposing their own power.
The artisan and the merchant refused to consider themselves as
subject serfs of a petty local lord: both took flight, although this was
at first very dangerous, and from one district to another they trav-
elled across the state territory, their labor and their business being in
demand, although it was very easy for the nobles to ambush them
and take everything they had accumulated, as considerable masses of
wealth had formed in the hands of individuals who were not mem-
bers of the traditional orders and hierarchies. These pioneers of a new
way of life demanded the right to be citizens of the state rather than
the subjects of a noble: in its first form they aspired to be subjects of
the king, as absolute ruler. The monarch and the dynasty were the first
expressions of a central power that embraced all the people and the
whole nation. The link between the state and the subject, the funda-
mental pillar of bourgeois law, was therefore beginning to be directly
established without mediation by way of the fragmentary feudal hi-
erarchies.
If we want to see this process operating in the domain of the eco-
nomic base, we need only recall the picturesque historical incident
that could be entitled, “The King of England Does Not Pay”. The
House of Bardi, the great bourgeois bankers of Florence, advanced
to the King of England a colossal sum in gold florins for military ex-
penses: but the King, having lost the war in question, paid back nei-
ther the interest nor the principal on the loan: the bank failed and
the Florentine economy suffered a terrible blow. The old banker died
frustrated, not having been able to find a jurisdiction before which he
could bring charges against the deadbeat. In the bourgeois system he
could even have done so before an English judge, and he would have

107
been paid.
If we want to depict the juridical aspect of this process, we may
refer to the play written by Lope de Vega, El mejor alcalde, el Rey
[The Best Mayor, the King], in which the king plays the role of the
hero, but the main demand is always bourgeois. In a provincial town
a certain Don Rodrigo abducted a youth. The boy’s father, after Don
Rodrigo laughed in his face, went to Madrid and petitioned the king;
the latter, in disguise, returned with him to the town, unarmed, with a
small bodyguard; he assumed the position of judge and severely con-
demned the local lord, ordering him to release the boy and pay in-
demnities. The concept that every citizen could obtain justice from
the king against the abuses of provincial power, expressed the bour-
geois demand for centralism.
Some years later the Miller of Sanssouci became famous for his
confrontation with King Frederick of Prussia, who wanted to expro-
priate the miller’s land to expand his pleasure park. The miller left
his interview with the king saying, “There are judges in Berlin!”. The
judge would condemn the king in the name of the king, and this would
appear to be a masterpiece of the bourgeois concept of the law: but
only a few years later the bourgeois itself, due to revolutionary exi-
gencies, would show more resolution and would condemn the king
to decapitation.
To the extent that in the old states ruled by the landowning no-
bility, as in the classical cases of France and England, the importance
of commerce and manufacture grew in relation to the agrarian econ-
omy, and to the extent that large banking firms, the state debt, the pro-
tectionist system, and a centralized and unitary system of tax collec-
tion were emerging, the bourgeoisie demanded more privileges from
royal power, that is, the central administration. Within the ideologi-
cal superstructure, by culturally and politically demanding these new
postulates, all these unitary systems are described and extolled as the
expression not of a dynasty that ruled by divine right, recognized and

108
invested by the religious power, but of all the people, of the totality of
the citizenry, in a word, of the nation. Patriotism, that ideal that was
eclipsed after its exaltation in classical antiquity, became the motto of
the new civil demands and very soon inflamed (since it arose from the
demands of the merchants and manufacturers) the intellectuals, writ-
ers and philosophers, who adorned the eruption of the new produc-
tive forces with a marvelous architecture of supreme principles and
literary decorations.

5 The Iridescent Superstructures of the

Capitalist Revolution
Just as the preconditions for the revolutionary struggle of the modern
proletariat were established by the full development of the capitalist
mode of production, the doctrine and program of the international
communist revolution are established once the critique of bourgeois
ideologies is fully developed, ideologies which assumed diverse na-
tional characteristics precisely because every bourgeois revolution is
national and possesses its characteristics of constructing in its own
particular way what Marx defines as the way an era “thinks about”
itself.
In Italy, as we have already pointed out, the economic content
of the bourgeois form emerged precociously, but proved insufficient
to assume control of society: its political content, although of great
historical importance, was limited to the control of small, free city-
republics, and their artisans, merchants or commercial navigation. These
forms were incapable of historically engaging in the constitution of a
national power. If, however, on the one hand, this first bourgeois so-
ciety would be reabsorbed by European feudal society despite its mil-
itary victories against the German emperor, on the other hand its ef-
fects on the ideological and above all artistic “superstructure” were to

109
leave their mark on later centuries. The rehabilitation of the political
forms of the Roman world and the free classical institutions created
by the citizens of the first republics, would be even more distinctly
reflected in the organization of states and nations, in the flourishing
of the new technology and of the great splendor of renaissance art,
which drew upon and emulated the classical models. At the same time
the literature and science that challenged the conformist domination
of the Catholic and scholastic culture acquired the same impulse, by
returning to and reinterpreting the study of the classic texts that pro-
vided material that was very relevant due to the social demands of the
epoch. This immense movement is therefore the product of a par-
ticular development of conflict and of transition from one mode of
production to another, the flash after the explosion of a new society
within the old one, but which was still incapable of breaking the last
chains, and only shook them with a historic earthquake; that is all,
even if it could be explained and elaborated in a better way, without,
however, having to resort to strange bedroom congresses of battle-
tested spermatozoids that gave rise to architects, painters, sculptors,
poets, musicians, thinkers, scientists, philosophers, etc., all of the first
magnitude.
And there were artists, poets and ideologists, with their memo-
rable and famous works, who never ceased to praise, even when they
found themselves in situations of political and social servitude, the
concept of the Italian fatherland and nationality, concepts that are in-
cessantly and insistently repeated by their modern-day imitators, who
are usually not at their level.
In Germany—and this has been addressed many times in the in-
vectives of Marx and Engels—where one must speak of a series of
miscarriages of the birth of the Nation, another great phenomenon
took place: the Reformation, which spread to one degree or another
throughout all of Europe.
The social struggle of the new strata against the old rule of the

110
feudal princes, who were supported by the Church, was incapable of
being crystallized in lasting political results, but it was not just limited
in this first stage to the critique of artistic or philosophical schools,
either, since it unfolded within the Church and was situated on the
terrain of religious dogma. A process of fragmentation of the uni-
fied Church into diverse national churches which escaped from the
rule of Rome then took place, not only modifying the articles of the
mystic doctrine to one extent or another, but above all breaking the
bonds with the ecclesiastical hierarchy and replacing it with the new
national hierarchies. While a national language is one of the aspects by
means of which the bourgeois nation state appears in history, another
no less important aspect is religion. What happened in Germany was
most impressive with regard to religion and the national church. It
was the agitation of the new classes that lay behind the Reformation:
bourgeoisie and master craftsmen of the German cities, as much as
the peasant serfs of the countryside, looked to Luther as the person
who would lead their struggle against the princes, the bastions of the
feudal and aristocratic landed structure, but Luther not only rejected
Münzer who commanded the defeated but glorious insurrection of
the peasants against the minor princes, but did not want to lead the
peasants against the great principalities, either.
While the limits and the bonds of medieval society were broken
in Italy only in literature and in Germany only in religion, as expres-
sions of immature or crushed revolutions, in the first pure historical
case of a bourgeois revolution, that of England, the social economy
was shaken to its deepest structural foundations. There, for climato-
logical and geographical reasons, agricultural production never could
have fed a dense population, and manufacturing and industrial pro-
duction, unknown until that point in any country, underwent explo-
sive growth. Tenant farmers accumulated large sums of money while
an increasing number of peasants were expelled from the land and
proletarianized: in this way the capitalist conditions of production

111
were much more intensely imposed than elsewhere and the manufac-
turing bourgeoisie acquired great importance. The nobility and roy-
alty were defeated in battle and, despite the brief period of the revolu-
tionary republic and the death of Cromwell, the bourgeoisie quickly
seized power by means of a new revolution, under a form that still
persists: parliamentary monarchy. There can be no question that the
geographical conditions, as much as the productive conditions, con-
tributed to confer upon the United Kingdom the character of a sin-
gle nation in contrast to the others, as the sea was its only geograph-
ical boundary. But as Engels pointed out in his Critique of the Draft
Social-Democratic Program of 1891 (in which Engels proposed, for a
Germany that was still divided into many small federated states, the
demand, “one and indivisible republic”), in the two British Isles one
finds at least three nationalities, with subdivisions along both linguis-
tic as well as racial and religious lines. With the passage of time the
Irish, of Celtic race, Catholic and formerly speakers of Gaelic, which
is now almost extinct, will become substantially differentiated; and
the Scottish people still conceive of themselves as very different from
the English, taking into account different influences and social tradi-
tions, as is also the case in Wales, and the effects of a series of invasions
and migrations: Romans, Saxons and finally Normans. The British
Isles therefore feature a mixture of races, traditions, dialects and lan-
guages, some of them literary, religions and churches; but it was there
that the first formation of that historic reality called the unified na-
tion state took place, which corresponds to the establishment of the
capitalist social mode.
In France the structure of the national state was being constructed
by way of the civil war between the classes. Its geographical bound-
aries are precisely defined, except for the historical oscillation of the
frontier on the Rhine, by seas and mountain chains. A rapid pro-
cess led to the formation of a single language and a literature that was
closely connected with that language and which absorbed the first lit-

112
erary manifestations of the Middle Ages by erasing their differences:
this same process gradually also affected the ethnological diversity of
France, which was quite significant. We must not forget that this na-
tion typically took its name from the Franks, a Germanic people origi-
nally from the east that crushed or subjugated the indigenous Bretons
and Celts. We therefore have two peoples of a non-Latin origin, but
this did not prevent their language from being formed from the Latin
root. The need for national unity was thus not territorial but social,
and the bourgeoisie were soon able to obtain recognition as the Third
Estate with representation in the Estates General which possessed a
consultative function for the real power. When this proved insuffi-
cient, the struggle became directly political. There was no industrial-
ism in France that was comparable to the British industries, and the
economic schools of thought in the two countries were expressions of
this fact: the English adopted the theory and apologetics of produc-
tive capitalism, while the French began with the agrarian Physiocratic
school, and then proceeded to adopt the mercantilist doctrine that
did not see value as emerging from productive labor but from trade
in products.
Politically, there were no hesitations: the French bourgeoisie con-
structed their doctrine of the state by aspiring directly for power: sov-
ereignty was not derived from inheritance or from divine right but
from the consultation of the opinion of the citizens; dogma collapsed
and reason was victorious, the orders and guilds were destroyed, and
electoral democracy, parliament and a republic would be established.
The other national form typical of the power of the bourgeoisie had
been forged in the crucible of history.
In the transition from the feudal to the modern mode of pro-
duction, a fundamental economic basis is the clash of the productive
forces with the old relations, and the political, juridical and ideolog-
ical superstructures emanate from this palingenesis of the economic
base.

113
 This cannot be reduced to a simple pharmaceutical prescription,
however. The bourgeoisie had not carried out a world revolution but
only the first round of the succession of national revolutions, and we
have not yet seen the last of them.
From this brief summary of the fundamental study of the geo-
graphic “zones” and “historical periods” that we are undertaking with
regard to the bourgeois revolution, in order to better understand the
proletarian revolution — disregarding its national particularities, and
embedding it within the spatio-temporal limits of its rich dynamic
— we may emphasize the following chronological series: Italy — art;
Germany — religion; England — economic science; France — pol-
itics. This is the integral superstructure of the capitalist productive
base.
The feats of the bourgeoisie in history are evidently economic, po-
litical, artistic and religious at the same time. But the richness of its rise
cannot be better summarized than with the words of the Manifesto:

“Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was ac-

companied by a corresponding political advance of that
class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal
nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the
medieval commune: here independent urban republic
(as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of
the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of
manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or
the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the no-
bility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies
in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establish-
ment of Modern Industry and of the world market, con-
quered for itself, in the modern representative State, ex-
clusive political sway. The executive of the modern state
is but a committee for managing the common affairs of

114
 the whole bourgeoisie.
“The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolu-
tionary part.
“. . . The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant
battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those
portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have
become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all
time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries.”

6 The Proletariat Makes Its Appearance on

the Historical Stage
With capitalist manufacture and industry the new social class of wage
laborers was created. There is a historical convergence between the
formation of this class in large masses and the greatest efforts on the
part of the bourgeoisie to assume political power and constitute itself
as a nation. The proletarian masses, after a first phase of chaotic re-
action against machinery in a feudal-medieval sense, found their road
alongside the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and it was on a national scale
that the proletariat achieved class unity, but not yet class autonomy.
The history of the modern epoch was largely characterized by this
struggle against a nobility that had too much autonomy and a church
that was too universal, in order to found, after the victory and the in-
tegral rise to power of the bourgeoisie, the modern nations. If the class
content, and the content of subversion of the old mode of produc-
tion, is—according to Marxism—the same for every national bour-
geoisie, it is just as evident according to our doctrine that the bour-
geois revolutions, as national revolutions, possess, each and every one
of them, an originality and a form of their own that possess a greater
significance than an exclusive consideration of their local historical

115
and geographical peculiarities would lead one to expect. And this serves,
in accordance with the forced march of capitalist development, to ex-
plain why the nations founded in this manner stand together in the
struggle against the old regime for class reasons, but fight tirelessly
against each other as nations and as states.
With the new ruling class, the bourgeois Third Estate, there also
appeared, in the first decades of the 18th century and even before,
as the new and fundamental social element: the working class. The
struggles for the conquest of power against feudalism and its clerical
allies, and the struggle for the constitution of national units, was fully
underway: the workers of the cities and the countryside participated
fully in them, even when they had authentic class organizations and
political parties of their own that anticipated the program of the over-
throw of bourgeois rule.
As the real socialist and communist movement emerged, not only
was it aware of the enormous complexity of this process as it con-
structed its theoretical critique, but it also established the conditions,
epochs and places in which the proletarians must totally support bour-
geois revolutionary movements and insurrections and national wars.
It would not be a bad idea in order to make this more clear, and
to rapidly dispel the surprise of those who seem to be hearing these
things for the first time, to refer once again to theManifesto:

“The proletariat goes through various stages of develop-

ment. With its birth begins its struggle with the bour-
geoisie.”

And here Marx recalls the first, “reactionary” form of struggle: burn-
ing down factories, the destruction of machines and of foreign prod-
ucts, calls for a return to the medieval status of the artisans, something
that had already been left behind.
This first stage suffices in itself to destroy the anti-historic posi-
tion of those who simplify matters by saying: there are two classes,

116
the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; everything is summed up by the
fight of the latter against the former. But let us continue with our pas-
sage from the Manifesto.

“At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass

scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their
mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more
compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their
own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie,
which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and
is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage,
therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but
the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute
monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois,
the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical move-
ment is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; ev-
ery victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.”

Again, let us continue with this passage on the incessant struggles

of the bourgeoisie and among the different national bourgeoisie. It
continues as follows:

“In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to

the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into
the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, sup-
plies the proletariat with its own elements of political
and general education4 , in other words, it furnishes the
proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.”
4 Bordiga’s note: We would translate this as “training”

117
 The living conditions of the modern proletariat, “modern sub-
jection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in
Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character”
This passage, which precedes the other famous passage from the
second chapter, the one that, quoted out of context, is so pleasing to
the opportunism of every era (and now the most foolish of them all,
the kind that takes the government of Tito as a model), corresponds
to the precise historical thesis that we have followed in this reexamina-
tion and elaboration of the national question. The bourgeoisie every-
where possesses a national character and its program consists in giv-
ing society a national character. Its struggle is national and in order to
conduct it the bourgeoisie must unite, transmitting this unity to the
proletariat itself while it uses the proletariat as an ally: the bourgeoisie
initiates its political struggle by constituting itself within every mod-
ern state as a national revolutionary class. The proletariat does not
have a national, but an international, character.
This does not imply the following theory: the proletariat does not
participate in national struggles, only in the international struggle.
The bourgeoisie has the national position in its revolutionary pro-
gram; its victory destroys the non-national character of medieval so-
ciety. The proletariat does not have the national position in its pro-
gram, a program that it will put into practice with its revolution and
its conquest of political power, and instead champions the position
of internationalism. The expression, national bourgeoisie, possesses a
specifically Marxist meaning, and during a particular historical stage
it is a revolutionary demand. The expression, nation in general, pos-
sesses an idealist and anti-Marxist meaning. The expression, proletar-
ian nation, possesses no meaning at all, neither in an idealist sense nor
in the Marxist sense.
This provides the correct framework for understanding everything
that relates to both the theory of history as well as the content of the
program of the revolutionary class that engages in historical struggle.

118
7 The Proletarian Struggle and the National
Sphere
Old and new polemical deviations have confused the programmatic
internationalist position of the communist proletariat with the for-
mally national nature of some of the first stages of its struggle. Histor-
ically, the proletariat cannot become a class and cannot create a class
political party except within the national sphere, and even the struggle
for power is waged in a national form insofar as it is oriented towards
overthrowing the state of its own bourgeoisie. It is also possible that
for a certain period of time after the proletarian conquest of power
the proletariat might restrict its activity to the national sphere. But
this does not obviate the essential historical opposition between the
bourgeoisie, which aspires to constitute bourgeois nations, present-
ing them as nations “in general”, and the proletariat which rejects the
nation “in general” and patriotic solidarity, since its duty is to con-
struct an international society, even though it understands that up to
a certain point in time the demand for national unity is useful, but
always within the bourgeois camp.
With regard to the transitional stages from the bourgeois struggle
for power to that of the proletariat, we shall turn to this other passage:
“Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy,
must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself
the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois
sense of the word.”
This passage, along with others, suffers in all existing translations
from a certain erroneous gradualism in the use of terms: political or-
ganization, political force, political supremacy, political power, and fi-
nally dictatorship. The above passage follows, in the series of responses
to bourgeois objections in the chapter, “Proletarians and Commu-
nists”, this other no less famous passage: “The Communists are fur-
ther reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

119
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what
they have not got.”5 After this radical affirmation of principle the text
cannot continue by saying: the workers have no nationality. It is a fact
that the workers are French, Italian, German, etc. Not only because
of race and language (we know that all such things make you laugh),
but by their physical location in the different territories where the na-
tional bourgeois state governs, which is a very influential factor in the
development of its class struggle, as well as in the international strug-
gle. This is crystal clear.
To separate a few sentences of Marx from this context in order to
make him say that the workers have as a program, after the defeat of
the bourgeoisie, the founding of separate proletarian nations as an es-
sential aspect of their revolution, is not only an illusion, but amounts
to imposing on the proletariat, with its high degree of current devel-
opment, the programs of the bourgeoisie, in order to keep it under
the rule of the latter.
This becomes even more clear if we refer to the logical and his-
torical succession, before it is declared that the proletariat does not
have a national character, in the preceding chapter, “Bourgeoisie and
Proletarians”.
We mentioned the description of the first stage of the struggle of
the proletariat, which assumed the form of a struggle against indus-
trial machinery; and then that of the next stage in which the prole-
tariat united for the first time with the bourgeoisie in struggle: there-
fore a national alliance of the workers was formed, for a bourgeois
goal.
Then the clash between the workers and the bourgeoisie in iso-
5 This passage and those that follow are taken from the Manifesto. In the En-

glish edition of 1888, where it speaks of the education of the proletariat, it specifies:
political and general education, while where it says that the proletariat will attain
the level of a national class it says: “the leading class of the nation”. The German
word Bildung means, in a more general sense, training.

120
lated enterprises and localities is described. A major step forward is
taken when the local struggles coalesce “into one national struggle be-
tween classes”.
Here Marx is not referring to a stupid isolation of the proletarian
nation, but to the contrary, to the radical supersession of the localist,
autonomist federalism represented by the Proudhonian reactionaries
and subsequently by other similar schools that were always combated
by Marxism. A conflict that takes place only in the vicinity of Rocca-
cannuccia or Turin is not a class struggle. Once the bourgeoisie has
been victorious in its demand for national unity, our class struggle
arises for the first time after national boundaries have been physically
established. Now we see the other essential words: “But every class
struggle is a political struggle.” This is the thesis thrown in the faces
of the federalists, and economistic thinkers of all types: “But every
class struggle is a political struggle.” And when there were no longer
any petty independent powers of the nobility but only the power of
the bourgeoisie that was manifested through its centralized national
state, we encountered a political struggle from the very moment when
the action of the proletarians is centralized within the boundaries of
a nation. This is why, when in Europe and France the proletarians
only fought as an assault force of the bourgeoisie, in England, with its
high degree of industrial development, they already confronted the
employers and the British state as a class.
We therefore do not find ourselves within the domain of the pro-
grammatic content of the proletarian struggle, but in a description
on the one hand of its successive stages in time, and on the other of
its stages in space, that is, of the perimeter within which the classes
wage their struggles (the word stage6 at first served to measure dis-
tance rather than time). Now the bourgeoisie in its long struggle had
regrouped the small feudal power centers into a single national stage
of struggle, and was forced to fight on it.
6 Latin: stadium, from the Greek stadion; a measure of distance

121
 Next we see it set forth explicitly: “Though not in substance, yet
in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first
a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course,
first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”
Therefore, the stages, or the successive phases in time can be clas-
sified with complete certainty as follows:

• The struggle of the worker against his employer in a primitive

and local form.

• The national political struggle of the bourgeoisie and its vic-

tory, with the participation of the workers united on a national
scale.

• Local and enterprise-based struggles of the workers against the

bourgeoisie.

• The united struggle of the proletariat of a particular national

state against the ruling bourgeoisie. This amounts to the con-
stitution of the proletariat as a national class, and the organiza-
tion of the proletariat as a class political party.

• Destruction of bourgeois rule.

• Conquest of political power by the proletariat.

On this basis, in a contingent and formal and constitutional-juridical

aspect, the proletariat, just as it constitutes itself as a class state (dicta-
torship), must also constitute itself as a national state, but all of this
with a transitory character.
Nevertheless, the proletariat, which does not possess a national
character, does not create this state as if it were a historically defining
characteristic of its class (as was the case with the bourgeoisie). The
character and the program of the proletariat and of its revolution are

122
still totally international, and the proletariat which must now “set-
tle matters with its own bourgeoisie” does not confront the nations
where this has not yet taken place, but confronts the foreign bour-
geoisie by joining in a unitary struggle together with the proletarians
of the other nations.
To conclude: the proletarian movement in particular historical
stages fights for the formation of nations, or favors the constitution
of nations of the bourgeoisie. In this stage and the subsequent one
in which one no longer speaks of alliances, the national postulate is
defined as a bourgeois postulate.

8 The Proletarian Strategy in Europe in 1848

The Manifesto, and we are not speaking here of a doctrinal exposition
or a description of the historical process, but of a strategic political ori-
entation of the already created communist party, in the zone of influ-
ence of the countries subject to the reactionary Holy Alliance, calls for
support of the insurrections of the bourgeois parties that were fight-
ing against feudal absolutism and the oppression of nationalities, and
that, if the bourgeoisie were to be victorious, this should be followed
by a break of the alliance and the workers revolution.
We prefer to speak of strategy rather than of tactics, since the ques-
tions posed by the incandescent period when the Manifesto was pub-
lished do not call for particular, local, or contingent solutions that
would vary from one place to another by accounting for alternative
choices with regard to specific actions. Tactics consist (as is the case in
the army when it is being considered whether a unit is in a situation
that favors attack, maintaining its position, or retreat) in determining
the moment to initiate, for example, a local strike, or even to give the
signal for an attack by an armed proletarian group in a neighborhood
or village. Strategy embraces the general orientation of a military cam-

123
paign or a revolution: either favorable conditions exist, or it is of little
use, and is instead disastrous, to change it or reverse positions in the
course of the campaign.
Without strategy there is no revolutionary party. For decades and
decades the commentators on the Manifesto and our other funda-
mental texts have striven to find excuses for the strategic errors that
Marx had committed in his perspective concerning the future action
of the communists. This formidable text, however, and with an in-
comparable brevity, not only contains the interpretive theory of the
modern historical process and of the general program of the society
that must succeed capitalism, but also contains certain precise refer-
ences with regard to time frames, postulating a rapid unfolding of
the process, in the various zones, concerning the development of class
struggles and wars.
It is not possible to dispense with a comprehensive view of the
social and political forces in Europe, since the characteristic aspect of
this historic period was the fact that, in parallel with the upheaval of
the process of formation of nations, together with the lyrical praise
for the bourgeois ideology, the movement that arose in Paris found
an immediate echo in Vienna, Warsaw, Milan, etc., despite the fact
that the resistance offered by the declining pre-bourgeois regime was
not the same in the various countries of Europe. In this incandescent
atmosphere, everything seemed to indicate that this was the last and
decisive attack to overthrow the royal and imperial bastions of the old
regime, and in the process putting an end to all kinds of obstacles that
stood in the way of the spread of capitalism.
But the exceptional power of this basic proclamation of ours is to
be sought in the declaration that, if on the one hand the first act in the
drama consisted of the battle for democratic rights and national free-
dom and against the last survivals of serfdom and medieval obscuran-
tism, on the other hand, within the new capitalist economy, there had
already been in existence for about ten years on a grand scale a conflict

124
between the productive forces and the relations of production that ac-
companied wage labor and industrial and agrarian commercialism, a
conflict that was not directed against the forces of landed feudalism.
Those who today still praise increasing levels of production, and
who present themselves as alleged revolutionaries, yet merely join in
the chorus of the invitations issued to capital to invest and produce
more, should recall the tremendous statement, which had already in
1848 foreseen the fall of the bourgeoisie, since society already had “too
much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry,
too much commerce”.
The core thesis of the Manifesto is not that, in the stage that char-
acterized the Europe of that time, Europe would become commu-
nist, but that in any period of violent transformation the system of
productive relations could shatter and that already in that era it was
evident that the relations of a capitalist type did not lead to equilib-
rium, but to greater contradictions within the limits of the productive
forces. A century later the volume of these forces has become much
larger, but so too has the thickness of the armored layers that protect
the monstrous tank where capital houses these productive forces. The
petty bourgeois, incapable of dialectically comprehending the com-
parison between a scientific prediction and a reality, and who also has
not understood the old adage that says, “closing the barn door after
the horse has already escaped”, will be horrified to hear a proposition
like this: we were closer to the proletarian revolution in 1848 than we
were in 1948, just as he will not understand the thesis that he is closer
to a state of cretinism with his doctorate than he was when he gradu-
ated from elementary school.
The European strategy of 1848 contemplated two formidable tasks
for the working class of the different countries: to lend aid to help
complete the bourgeois formation of independent national states; and
to try to overthrow the power of the victorious bourgeoisie just as it
was overthrowing the power of the remnants of feudalism.

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 History, its vicissitudes and the clash of material forces have caused
the conclusion of this process to recede into the distance, but they
have not undermined in the least the strategic basis of that time: one
cannot win the second point if one has not won the first, that is, one
must clear away the last obstacles that stand in the way of the organi-
zation of society into national states.
The first obstacle was raised in 1815 and was then reinforced af-
ter the defeat of Napoleon: the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia and
Russia. The position of the Manifesto is that there will not be a Eu-
ropean social republic if the Holy Alliance is not overthrown, and
therefore it was necessary to fight, together with the revolutionary
democrats of the time, to cast off the yoke of the Holy Alliance borne
by the peoples of Central Europe, and at the same time it was neces-
sary to unmask these democrats before the proletarians by preparing
for the time when, once bourgeois national liberation was assured ev-
erywhere with its elected democracies, an even more profound crisis
would arrive that is the fruit of the contradictions of the capitalist
mode of production, with the historic conflicts and outbursts that it
would necessarily entail, instead of the idyllic equality of the citizens
in the state and the nations of the world.
If we could only be a little less gossipy and stupid than a salaried
politician, who thinks that the course of history ends with the end
of his term in office, we would see that this gigantic vision obtained
its historic confirmation, however difficult it was to erode the Holy
Alliance, even though the triumphant capitalist civilization is even
harsher and more despicable.
The fourth chapter, devoted to strategy, analyzes, as everyone knows,
the tasks of the communist party in the different countries. A brief
commentary serves to establish that the communists in America, Eng-
land and France, that is, the countries with a highly developed capital-
ist system, should only have relations with working class parties, while
criticizing their critical defects and their demagogic illusions. Then

126
comes the part (whose elaboration we shall outline in this final part
of our exposition) relating to Poland and Germany, that is, the coun-
tries subject to the regimes of the Holy Alliance: here the support for
bourgeois parties is legitimized: in Poland, the party that advocated
the emancipation of the serfs in the countryside and national resurrec-
tion; in Germany, the parties of the bourgeoisie, because they fought
against the monarchy, the nobility and (this is directed at our modern
traitors) the petty bourgeoisie. And no less well-known and repeated
in other documents is the fact that this proposal of common actions,
with arms in hand, did not overlook for even one second the merci-
less critique of bourgeois principles and capitalist social relations, and
next comes the schema of the bourgeois revolution as the immediate
prelude to the proletarian revolution. History did not refute this, but
postponed its realization: as we have said so many times, both revolu-
tions failed.

9 Revolutionary Retreat and the Workers

Movement
The struggles of 1848 did not lead to the general victory of the Euro-
pean bourgeoisie against the forces of absolutist reaction; much less
were they capable of leading to a victory of the proletariat over the
bourgeoisie, something that was only attempted in France. In the un-
favorable period that followed, which lasted until 1866, the position
of the Marxists oscillated between, on the one hand, the ruthless cri-
tique of the democratic and humanitarian bourgeois liberals, and on
the other, providing the necessary encouragement to the struggles for
the unity and independence of the nationalities, which were embod-
ied in insurrections and wars between states (Poland, Germany, Italy,
Ireland, etc.).
When, after the battles of 1848-1849, Marx and Engels drew up a

127
balance sheet of that tempestuous period (which seemed so promis-
ing that even today popular opinion perceives it as more colorful than
Europe and the world are in this terrible century with all its years
of disasters and torments), they were convinced that the revolution-
ary phase would resume, but not in the short term. First, the theory
would have to be systematized and then the organization, before it
would be possible to think of a general victorious action: and there
was no lack of time during which these tasks could be carried out.
In Germany and in all of Central Europe, as in Italy, the balance
sheet of the struggle was the same: the insurgent bourgeois liberal
revolutionaries in arms were defeated on the barricades; the workers,
who had fought alongside them as allies, also suffered from the re-
sults of this serious defeat, so the subsequent situation of a dispute
between bourgeois and workers over power never even arose. So it
was not the communist revolution that was defeated, but the liberal
revolution, and the workers had fought everywhere trying to save it
from catastrophe, as was foreseen theoretically and expressed politi-
cally in the Manifesto.
The exceptions to this historical rule were England and France. In
England the feudal reaction had already been militarily defeated over
a century before and the country was already undergoing class con-
flicts between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: where, as was the
case with Chartism, these conflicts assumed an initial political form,
even if it was in the form of vague programs full of democratic ideolo-
gies, the bourgeoisie had not hesitated for even a minute to violently
repress them, although at the same time it had to make a series of leg-
islative and reformist concessions mitigating the inhuman exploita-
tion of the factory operatives.
France followed a different course, of extraordinary significance
for the theory and politics of the proletarian revolution. After the de-
feat of Napoleon, which for Marx was a decisive defeat of the bour-
geois revolutionary force by the European absolutist reaction (it is

128
necessary to know the truth about this, in the face of all those who
listen to the phrases about Caesar, the despot, the dictator, the person
who stifled liberty in 1789 and suchlike stories; in a letter from Marx
to Engels dated December 2, 1856, Marx writes that it is a “... histori-
cal fact that the intensity and the viability of all revolutions since 1789
may be gauged with fair accuracy by their attitude towards Poland.
Poland is their ‘external’ thermometer. This is demonstrable en dé-
tail from French history. It is conspicuous in our brief German revo-
lutionary period, likewise in the Hungarian. Of all the revolutionary
governments, including that of Napoleon I, the Comité du salut pub-
lic is an exception only in as much as it refused to intervene, not out
of weakness, but out of ‘mistrust’...”). Now let us review the series
with which we are already familiar. Between 1815 and 1831, a Bourbon
ruled, placed on the throne by Austria, Prussia and Russia after Wa-
terloo. In 1831 the revolutionary insurrection in Paris overthrew the
absolute monarchy and Orleans mounted the throne, with a parlia-
mentary constitution. It was therefore a victory for the bourgeoisie,
who were henceforth supported by the workers.
The bourgeois monarchy, however, openly favored the big landown-
ers and financiers, and in February 1848 Paris rose again and proclaimed
the republic. Bourgeois, petty bourgeois and workers proclaimed, as
Marx enthusiastically recalled, the resplendent (without any knowl-
edge of neon lights) slogan of 1793: “Libertè, Egalitè, Fraternitè”.
This time the working class, which the new government imme-
diately rebuffed by refusing to implement the social reforms it had
promised in exchange for workers support, began the struggle to go
further than their traitorous allies. This struggle took the form of the
impressive battles of June 1848 described by Marx in that book that
is both science and epic, The Class Struggles in France, which was
first published serially in three issues of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue in 1850. The crushing defeat of the work-
ers historically established the capacity of the modern republican and

129
democratic bourgeoisie to carry out more ruthless repressions than
the feudal aristocracy and the despotic monarchy. From that moment
we have possessed the complete revolutionary schema utilized against
the opportunist wave of the first world war, and which had to be mo-
bilized against the opportunism of the second world war as well. It is
in these pages that we find the fundamental political thesis: Destruc-
tion of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class! And also:
Permanent revolution, class dictatorship of the proletariat! These are
the “forgotten words of Marxism” reestablished by Lenin. And these
were the words that were forgotten again, whose memory must be
reestablished today against the renegades from Marxism and Lenin-
ism, and which Engels highlighted in his Introduction to the edition
of 1895 by formulating the fundamental economic thesis: “appropri-
ation of the means of production ... and, therefore, the abolition of
wage labour, of capital and of their mutual relations” (Introduction
by Engels to the 1895 edition of The Class Struggles in France).
If the state, as in Russia, takes possession of capital without abol-
ishing capital, it does the same thing as a bourgeois state. The state
that economically abolishes capital, wage labor and the relations of
exchange between capital and labor, can only be the state of the pro-
letariat!
In France — but not in the rest of Europe — after 1848 the se-
ries of glorious alliances made with the Jacobin bourgeoisie was de-
nounced by the workers, and it is precisely from 1848 that we possess
our model — yes, model, the revolution is the discovery of a historic
model — of the communist class revolution. These denunciations
were not revocable since they were marked by the blood of tens of
thousands of workers who fell at the barricades, three thousand of
whom were bestially shot down by the bourgeois republic after they
had surrendered and been taken prisoner.
Marx justified the fact that in 1852, during the coup d’état of Louis
Napoleon, which was by no means a return to feudalism, the French

130
proletariat, which certainly could not be accused of baseness, opposed
with icy indifference the fall of that fake democracy. The Italian pro-
letariat did not acquit itself nearly so well with that banal episode in-
volving Mussolini, which was comparable to the French case!
The French nation is a conquest that is already assured by his-
tory. The proletariat no longer has any impediments standing in the
way of its “liberation from its own national bourgeoisie”. The work-
ers of France, with the uprisings of June and the Paris Commune,
have served this great mission with great honor since the conspiracy of
Babeuf in the great revolution. But they belied their tradition in 1914
and 1939, which were two serious crises for the bourgeoisie. Here, too,
the words of Marx are valid: “A new revolution is only a consequence
of a new crisis. The one, however, is as sure to come as the other.”

10 National Struggles after 1848

The development of the revolution in Germany in 1848 did not reach
the stage of the political victory of the bourgeoisie and its establish-
ment in power; and therefore the German proletariat, which at that
time was not very numerous, did not reach the strategic point of at-
tacking the bourgeoisie after having first supported it. From then on
the position of the Marxist communists is that of favoring a process
leading to the creation of a German national state and a liberal revolu-
tion against the Prussian dynasty and state, as a necessary transitional
stage towards an open class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat.
The process leading to the formation of the German state is par-
ticularly complex from the historical point of view. We still do not
have a united German national state: such a state did not exist before
the first world war, and only Hitler finally created it with the forced
annexation of Austria, which had been deprived after its defeat in the

131
first world war of its rule over peoples of other nationalities. Today,
after the second world war, the victors have divided the Germans into
three states: East Germany, West Germany and Austria. But while
both sides are talking about the reunification of the two Germanies,
everyone is trying to isolate the weak and small Austria from them.
In order to characterize the position of Marxism on this issue we
could provide innumerable quotations from the post-1848 period.
The Prussian state is defined as a feudal and reactionary state that
cannot be transformed into a bourgeois political state within its ter-
ritory, and the Hohenzollern monarchy is also viewed as an adversary
of the bourgeois revolution. Dynasty, aristocracy, army and bureau-
cracy, all are considered in terms of nationality as non-German, with
influences and connections of non-national, Russophilic, Baltic and
Philoslavic kinds. An indisputable basic element in the analysis of the
formation of political nationality after the advent of capitalism, is the
antagonism with the great bordering nationalities, and although this
is fully applicable to the French, who are age-old enemies, it is com-
pletely missing from the eastern frontiers: within this process we must
consider as particularly contradictory the wars of Frederick II, which,
although they reinforced the power of Prussia, did so by transforming
Prussia into a garrison-state.
With respect to the wars against Napoleon, they did not provide
a suitable foundation for the German nation, either, since they were
waged against the vanguard of the new bourgeois and national society
formed by the armies of the Convention, the Consulate and the First
Empire, and their nature was distorted due to the alliance with the
oppressors of the nationalities, the autocrats of Russia and Austria.
As a result, these wars could not serve as foundation for the process
of German unification.
We must nonetheless obtain a clear understanding of the posi-
tion of Marx and Engels, since on the one hand they refused to con-
sider the Prussian state and territory as the basis for a modern nation,

132
but on the other hand were not in favor of the preservation and inde-
pendence of the small states and principalities. Prussia, without these
minor states, or without preserving its hegemony over them, is not
the German nation that was awaited for centuries, but one cannot
speak of a Bavarian or Saxon nation, either, and the diminutive grand
duchies are pure feudal residues. Marx and Engels never — because
they had their sights set on the model of the neighboring “single and
indivisible republic” — supported a federal system.
For Marx and Engels a democratic state centralization in which
each citizen would be juridically German and a subject of the central
power would have been a great step forward. Later, the revolution-
ary assault of the increasingly more numerous German working class
would be directed against this united capitalist state.
After the defeat in 1850 of the domestic anti-feudal insurrection,
with the full capitulation of the weak bourgeoisie to Prussianism, the
change could only be expected to be brought by wars between states,
wars based on national questions. Marx’s positions with regard to
the war with Denmark in 1849, the Austro-French war of 1859, the
Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and finally the Franco-Prussian war of
1871 which led to the creation of the empire although this empire
would always retain a Prussian and Bismarckian imprint, are of par-
ticular interest.
In all of these wars, as we have pointed out on other occasions,
Marx and Engels clearly took sides and supported the victory of one of
the contenders, and engaged in political agitation in support of their
views. Their positions were naturally far removed from apologetics
for the bourgeois radicals and the national revolutionaries of various
nationalities who were then travelling all over Europe and who are
treated by Marx and Engels—even the most illustrious ones like Kos-
suth, Mazzini, Garibaldi and others (not to speak of the French of the
same ilk who completely lacked any justification for the historical ap-
pearance of the bourgeois fatherland, such as Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and

133
other pompous figures)—as phonies and sanctimonious donkeys. We
must constantly keep this distinction in mind, so that our historical
reconstruction is not ingenuously considered as just another example
of the recent and contemporary nauseating praise lavished by “prole-
tarians” on all the Churchills, Trumans, DeGaulles, Orlandos, Nittis
and so many other present-day liberators and partisans. A few refer-
ences and just one quotation will do, as we refer the reader to a few of
our “Threads of Time” on the Nation, War, and Revolution (issues
nos. 9 to 13 of Battaglia Comunista, 1950).
War between Piedmont and Austria in 1848 and 1849. Austria is
condemned despite its being the victim of aggression, since this was a
war for the formation of the Italian nation.
War between Prussia and Denmark in 1849 for the conquest of
Schleswig-Holstein. Commonly condemned as a war of aggression
on the part of Prussia; Marx and Engels support it, however, because
its purpose was to incorporate ethnically German territories into the
Prussian state.
War between Napoleon III in alliance with Piedmont against Aus-
tria in 1859, and subsequent conflicts in Italy in 1860. The position of
Marx and Engels is clearly in favor of the constitution of the united
Italian state, and therefore in favor of the defeat of Austria; Engels
demonstrated that German interests were not defended on the banks
of the Mincio. Does that mean that Marx and Engels supported Bona-
parte? Now we also see the text that also invoked the struggle against
Bonaparte on the Rhine, proposed much later, against Russia. The
Second Empire is also castigated for having defrauded the Italian na-
tion in Nice, Savoy and also in Corsica. Marx would later refer to this
in his text on the Paris Commune, ferociously stigmatizing the inter-
vention in defense of the papacy and against Rome as the capital of
Italy, as he did after the intervention of the Second French Republic
crushed the Roman Republic in 1849.
Since we shall discuss the wars of 1866 and 1870 below, we shall

134
submit the quotation that clarifies the thought of Marx: the neces-
sary demand in support of the formation of the German nation, in
order afterwards to overthrow the bourgeoisie; denunciation of the
counterrevolutionary state ruled from Berlin.
The letter to Engels, dated March 24, 1863:

“. . . Vincke and Bismarck do, in fact, accurately repre-

sent the principle of the Prussian State; that the ‘State’
of Prussia (a very different creature from Germany) can-
not exist either without Russia as she is, or with an inde-
pendent Poland. The whole history of Prussia leads one
to this conclusion which was drawn long since by Messrs
Hollenzollern (Frederick II included). This princely con-
sciousness is infinitely superior to the limited mentality
of the subject that marks your Prussian liberal. Since,
therefore, the existence of Poland is necessary to Ger-
many and completely incompatible with the State of Prus-
sia. . . . the Polish question simply provides further occa-
sion for proving that it is impossible to prosecute Ger-
man interests so long as the Hollenzollerns’ own state
continues to exist.”

We see at every step, then, Germany, the German nation, German

interests: clearly German national interests. This clearly expresses, with
respect to a particular case—but one that was very important—the
thesis that the unitary and centralized constitution of the national
state is in the interest of the bourgeoisie, since it is the form of its class
power, but it is also in the interest of the proletariat up until the mo-
ment of its realization, because from that moment on the scramble
for political and class positions commences, by means of which the
proletariat will overthrow the power of the national bourgeoisie.

135
11 The Polish Question
Complete solidarity with the demand for the national independence
of Poland, oppressed by the Czar, was of fundamental importance
because it was not just a matter of a historical opinion expressed in
theoretical texts, but of a real and distinct political alignment of the
forces of the First International. Not only did it offer and provide the
most complete support of the forces of the European workers, but
the Polish revolt is considered as a springboard for the resumption of
a revolutionary situation and the general struggle on the whole con-
tinent.
We shall follow these manifestations of the texts and documents
of our school in detail because we have to show that the opinion that
Marxist politics, with regard to making evaluations and deductions as
the different contingent situations arise, has no difficulty in changing
course, is erroneous; to the contrary, the political decisions are rigidly
bound, stage by stage, to a unitary view of the general historical course
of the revolution and, in the case at hand, to the materialist-historical
definition of the function of nationalities according to the succession
of the great and typical modes of production.
The fragmentary and episodic utilization of these elements has
been practiced for more than a half century by various tendencies, for
the purpose of justifying the incessant reversals of opportunism and
eclecticism, which with each passing day claim to have elaborated a
new doctrine and a new norm, shamelessly transforming the devils of
yesterday into the angels of today, or vice versa.
The Polish question, however, is important even from other points
of view. It might seem that a marked display of sympathy for the strug-
gles for national independence possesses an almost Platonic dimen-
sion because it is limited exclusively to only writings and studies of a
historical or social theoretical type, and also due to the fact that these
efforts are not also translated onto the plane of political programs and

136
action programs of the party, of the real and true communist prole-
tarian party that during the period we are examining (1847-1871) al-
ready had assumed as its original and proper content the struggle be-
tween the proletariat and capitalism, and the destruction of that so-
cial mode of production. But it is not the writers Marx and Engels
whom we shall call to testify, but Marx and Engels the international
leaders of the communist movement. If someone after a superficial
and juvenile reading, might deduce that the writings of Engels on the
Po, the Rhine, Nice and Savoy were merely political-military studies
undertaken during a lull in the class revolution, departing from the
social-economic method (not to mention, in case this was not obvi-
ous, that within this conception it is permitted to open up parenthe-
ses and ‘free trade zones’ of every kind within the Marxist doctrine of
the course of human affairs, in each and every one), it is very impor-
tant to show that all the deductions he makes are born from an ab-
solute adherence to the root of the materialist explanation of history
and of the discernment of the collective human “journey” in time in
the light of the development of the productive forces. No one should
be allowed to forget this, even if they are holding a sword, or rather
a scalpel, a pen, a paintbrush, a chisel or a saw, or the hammer and
sickle.
A “situational” Marx and Engels are very much suited to the Kom-
inform and similar congregations, and comprise the core falsification
among all the miserable falsifications that circulate in that milieu.
In a letter dated February 13, 1863, Marx inquires of his friend En-
gels about the events in Poland. The news of that heroic insurrection
in the cities and the countryside, which became a real civil war waged
against the Russian forces, caused Marx to exclaim:

“This much is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly

opened in Europe once more. And the general state of
affairs is good.” But the memory of the bitter defeats of

137
 1850 is still too fresh: “But the comfortable delusions and
almost childish7 enthusiasm with which we welcomed
the revolutionary era before February 1848, have gone by
the board... Old comrades ... are no more, others have
fallen by the wayside or gone to the bad and, if there is
new stock, it is, at least, not yet in evidence. Moreover,
we now know what role stupidity plays in revolutions,
and how they are exploited by blackguards.”

So get going, idlers, you are not children anymore, but senile; rise up
to the level of Karl Marx with regard to this point.
This letter gives, with a handful of indications, which we shall
complement by referring to subsequent letters, the balance sheet of
the attitude of all the European political forces towards the Polish in-
surrection. The Prussian “nationalists”, who turned into supporters
of national independence in order to deprive the Viennese Emperor
of his status as the leader of the German confederation and hypo-
critically proclaimed their sympathy with Italy and Hungary which
were demanding their independence, were caught with their hands
in the cookie jar: they were just so many filthy Russophiles and they
closed ranks against the Poles. The Russian democratic revolution-
aries (Herzen) were also put to the test; despite their Slavic predilec-
tions they had to defend the Poles against the Russian state (refusing
to agree to support a proposal that once a constitution was granted
by the Czar, Poland should continue to be a Russian province). The
bourgeois governments of London and of Plon-Plon (Napoleon III)
expressed their hypocritical support for the Polish cause due to their
rivalries with Russia, but both were suspect, and the betrayal of the
French is a matter of record; their agents were in constant contact with
7 Bordiga’s note: This marks the first instance of the use of this adjective that

was so frequently utilized by Lenin, but always in a non-disrespectful way

138
the right wing of the Polish movement that would effectively back
down, especially if the revolt were to suffer a setback.
Almost nobody could or wanted to create a European “democ-
racy” out of insurrectionary Poland; and Marx immediately tried to
get the International Workingmen’s Association, which had been formed
in London on September 28, 1864, to publish a practical action pro-
gram. Before the famous meeting in Saint Martin’s Hall, Marx ad-
dressed the English workers Association. He sketched out his plan
in brief: a short proclamation to the workers of all countries on the
part of the English — a meticulous treatise on the Polish question
written about particular aspects by Marx and Engels. And just after
September 1864 there were discussions within the General Council,
over which Marx exercised a moral chairmanship although he had not
officially accepted the position, concerning what kind of action to un-
dertake. These discussions led to some debates of great interest that
clarified the political problems of the moment.
Pro-Polish action is therefore included in all the documents that
emanated from the party, from the workers International; and it was
considered to be the principal lever for the maximum development
of workers agitation in Europe by helping to precipitate the occasions
for the emergence of a revolutionary movement. Therefore the elabo-
rations concerning principles about the historic problem of the sup-
port of the internationalist proletariat for a national struggle have a
great importance.

12 The International and the Question of

Nationalities
Within the General Council of the First International and under the
leadership of Marx, a series of interesting debates provides the ele-
ments for the rectification of errors of principle on the question of

139
the historic struggles of nationalities. The tendency to ignore them
instead of explaining them from the materialist point of view, rather
than being evidence of an advanced internationalism is instead a man-
ifestation of particularist and federalist positions derived from utopian
and libertarian theories that Marxism had jettisoned.
The same congress of the International Workingmen’s Associa-
tion that was convoked in solidarity with the Poles (it produced a let-
ter from the English workers to the French workers with respect to
Poland) also expressed support for the Armenians oppressed by Rus-
sia, and as Marx himself recounts, many elements who were radical
democrats and who aroused the mistrust of the workers also attended
this congress. Concerned about theoretical clarity but also about the
power of the movement, at a historical moment when the demands
for independence had a real revolutionary content, Marx arranged to
have an unsuitable report shelved and drafted the powerful Inaugural
Address, in which the struggle of the proletarian class in England and
on the continent was given the greatest emphasis.
Marx’s famous letter of November 4, 1864, totally clarifies the po-
sition that should be taken with regard to the arrival of so many democrats
in the workers ranks. This is interesting with regard to any attempt to
form a correct evaluation of the activities of those who would today
be accused of right-wing deviation with regard to the national ques-
tion. A certain Wolff proposed a statute that he claimed was the same
one adopted by the Italian workers societies: Marx writes that the lat-
ter “. . . are essentially associated Benefit Societies... I saw the stuff
later. It was evidently a concoction of Mazzini’s, and that tells you in
advance in what spirit and phraseology the real question, the labour
question, was dealt with. As well as how the nationalities question
intruded into it.” When Eccarius asked him to attend the meeting of
the subcommittee, Marx heard “a fearfully cliché-ridden, badly writ-
ten and totally unpolished preamble pretending to be a declaration
of principles, with Mazzini showing through the whole thing from

140
beneath a crust of the most insubstantial scraps of French socialism.”
There was also, in the Italian declaration, “something quite im-
possible, a sort of central government of the European working classes
(with Mazzini in the background, of course)”.
Finally, Marx drafted the Address, reducing the statutes from 40
to 10 articles, and read the text that would later become historical, ac-
cepted by all. His method, however, was not clearly illustrated in this
text. Many of the people in attendance will not understand anything,
he commented to Engels, and they are the types that would join the
liberals in a campaign to demand universal suffrage.
Everyone knows that the famous Address, after the social and class
part, contains a final paragraph referring to international politics, which
states that the workers demand that the relations between states should
be subject to the same moral norms that rule over relations between
men. The phrase is repeated in the first address on the war of 1870,
and not only expresses a bourgeois postulate, like all those concern-
ing the national question, but expresses it in a purely propagandistic
form. Marx will be excused for having had to act fortiter in re, suaviter
in modo — harshly with regard to content, but gently with regard to
form. But the false Marxists of our time have also fallen beneath the
worst urine streams of the ultra-bourgeois democrats. Let us take a
look at Marx’s true clarification:

“Insofar as International politics is mentioned in the ‘Ad-

dress’, I refer to countries and not to nationalities, and
denounce Russia, not the minores gentium [smaller na-
tions]. The Sub-Committee adopted all my proposals.
I was, however, obliged to insert two sentences about
‘duty’ and ‘right’, and ditto about ‘Truth, Morality and
Justice’ in the preamble to the rules, but these are so placed
that they can do no harm.”

141
 On December 10, 1864, Marx summarized the debate on the pro-
posal of Fox concerning the appeal on behalf of Poland. This good
democrat went to great extremes in order to speak of “the concept of
‘class’, [or] at least a semblance of it”. But there was a point that did
not escape Marx, an expression of sympathy for the French democ-
racy that was almost extended as far as “Boustrapa” (Plon-Plon).

“I opposed this and unfolded a historically irrefutable

tableau of the constant French betrayal of Poland from
Louis XV to Bonaparte III. At the same time, I pointed
out how thoroughly inappropriate it was that the Anglo-
French Alliance should appear as the ‘core’ of the Inter-
national Association, albeit in a democratic version.”

The proposal was accepted with Marx’s revisions, but the Swiss
delegate Jung, representing the minority, voted against this “altogether
‘bourgeois’” text.
To get an idea of the degree of interest stimulated by the question
of the revolt in Poland, we should point out that the General Council
not only had direct contacts with the bourgeois Poles, but that in one
session it even received representatives of the aristocracy, since they
also formed part of the national anti-Russian union. These aristocrats
assured the Council that they, too, were democrats, and that the na-
tional revolution in Poland was impossible without a peasant upris-
ing. Marx restricted himself to asking himself whether these people
really believed what they were saying.
Let us now move on to 1866: once again the Polish question was
“the real bone of contention” in the Association. A certain Vésinier
accused the International, no less, of having become “a committee
of nationalities in tow to Bonapartism”. This aroused Marx’s wrath.
“This ass” had attributed to the Parisian delegates, who to the con-
trary had considered it inopportune, a paragraph on Poland included

142
in the agenda of the Geneva Congress. In this paragraph it was de-
plored that, “yielding to pernicious influences, questions such as the
abolition of Russian influence in Europe that bear no relation to the
aims of the Association, were included in the programme of the Geneva
Congress, etc.” should be addressed. Vésinier’s thesis is as follows: it is
neither class-based nor internationalist to encourage a national war
by the Poles against the Russians and to become enemies of Russia,
because we must be for peace among the peoples. As justification for
this position he recalled the iniquities of the Bonaparte regime and of
the English bourgeoisie, and the emancipation in Russia and Poland
of the serfs, which only recently took place, and asserted “that it was
the duty of the Central Committee to proclaim solidarity and fra-
ternity among all peoples, and not to put one of them alone beyond
the pale of Europe”. Vésinier then accused the Poles of using the As-
sociation “to help to restore their nationhood, without concerning
themselves with the question of the emancipation of the workers”.
Marx restricted himself to pointing out the howlers that all this non-
sense and fairy tales were full of, depicting it as “the Muscovitist line
pursued by Proudhon and Herzen” and saying that Vésinier “is just
the fellow for the Russians. Of little merit as a writer... But with tal-
ent, great rhetorical power, much energy and above all unscrupulous
through and through”.
Vésinier’s proposal was defeated; “we are commemorating their
[the Polish] revolution on 23 January”. We are totally of the opinion
that every armed revolution “against the existing social conditions” is
worth more than any theory endowed with an exaggerated extremism
and that the pacifism between the peoples that Vésinier invoked was
really an embrace between the bourgeoisie of the West and the Czar
of all the Russias, in the genuine or feigned belief that this served the
interests of the working class.

143
13 The Slavs and Russia
The historical cycle of the formation of bourgeois nation states, which
proceeded in parallel with the spread of industrialism and the forma-
tion of the great markets, spread to England, France, Germany and
Italy; other lesser powers could be considered to be constituted na-
tions: Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Sweden and Norway. The
Marxist demand applied to the typical case of Poland, and we must
evaluate it as a declaration of war against the “Holy Alliance” of Rus-
sia, Austria and Prussia. But this cycle would come to an end, in the
Marxist view, leaving unresolved, among other problems, the prob-
lem of the Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
In 1856 Marx had become interested in a book by the Pole Mieroslawski,
openly directed against Russia, Germany and Pan-Slavism, in which
the author proposed “a free confederation of Slavic nations with Poland
as the Archimedean people”, which means the people of the vanguard,
the pioneer of freedom. Something of this kind was to take place with
the formation of the Little Entente of the Slavic states (Bulgaria, Yu-
goslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland as the most important and ho-
mogeneous state) after the first world war and the dissolution of the
Austrian Empire (1918). And everyone knows that lasted for barely
twenty years, until there was another repartition between the Ger-
mans and the Russians in 1939.
Marx’s critique of Mieroslawski’s social theory is very interesting.
Besides criticizing Mieroslawski for founding his great hopes on the
English and French governments, Marx points out that he does not
foresee the future major industrialization of many Polish cities and
regions and bases his independent state on the “‘democratic’ Lechitic
community”. At first the Polish peasants were united in free commu-
nities, in a kind of agrarian guild system, confronting a “dominium”,
or territory under the military and administrative control of a noble;
the nobles, in turn, elected the king. The land of the free peasants

144
was soon usurped, one part by the monarchy and the other by the
aristocracy, and the peasant communities were subjected to serfdom.
Nonetheless, a “peasant middle class” survived, with the right to form
a semi-nobility, a sort of “Equestrian Order”: but the peasants could
become members of this order only if they participated in a war of
conquest or in the colonization of virgin lands; this stratum in turn
was transformed into a kind of “lumpen-proletariat of the aristoc-
racy”, a kind of tatterdemalion nobility: “This kind of development
is interesting”, Marx writes, “because here serfdom can be shown to
have arisen in a purely economic way, without the intermediate link
of conquest and racial dualism.” In fact, the king, the high and low no-
bility, and the peasantry were all of the same race and spoke the same
language, and the national tradition was as old as it was strong. Marx’s
thesis therefore establishes that the class yoke appeared with the de-
velopment of the productive technical means, even within a uniform
ethnic group, just as in other cases it appeared as the result of a clash
between two races and two peoples, in which case race and language,
in turn, functioned as “economic agents” (Engels—see Part 1).
Evidently the Polish democrat did not foresee the appearance in
the conflict of a real industrial bourgeoisie and much less that of a
powerful and glorious proletariat, which in 1905 held their own against
the Czarist troops, and even rose up during the second world war in
a desperate attempt to take power in the martyred capital against the
German and Russian General Staffs, ending up just like the commu-
nards of Paris, who fell in the crossfire of their enemies.
Marx’s attention never for even a moment strayed from Russia,
since he considered the Czar’s army as the mobile reserve force of the
European counterrevolution, always ready to cross the frontiers when-
ever it had to restore “order” by crushing any movement that sought
to overthrow the states of the old regime, thus cutting off the road
towards the different points from which the revolution of the prole-
tariat could emerge. Almost ten years later, Marx was interested in the

145
doctrine of Duchinski (a Russian professor from Kiev, who lived in
Paris at the time). Marx relates that Duchinski maintained that

“the real Muscovites, i.e., inhabitants of the former Grand

Duchy of Moscow, were for the most part Mongols or
Finns, etc., as was the case in the parts of Russia situated
further east and in its south-eastern parts. I see from it at
all events that the affair has seriously worried the St Pe-
tersburg cabinet (since it would put an end to Panslav-
ism in no uncertain manner). All Russian scholars were
called on to give responses and refutations, and these in
the event turned out to be terribly weak. The purity of
the Great Russian dialect and its connection with Church
Slavonic appear to lend more support to the Polish than
to the Muscovite view in this debate. (....) It has ditto
been shown geologically and hydrographically that a great
‘Asiatic’ difference occurs east of the Dnieper, compared
with what lies to the west of it, and that (as Murchi-
son has already maintained) the Urals by no means con-
stitute a dividing line. Result as obtained by Duchin-
ski: Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They
are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic
race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be
chased back across the Dnieper, etc. Panslavism in the
Russian sense is a cabinet invention, etc. I wish that Duchin-
ski were right and at all events that this view would pre-
vail among the Slavs. On the other hand, he states that
some of the peoples in Turkey, such as Bulgars, e.g., who
had previously been regarded as Slavs, are non-Slav.” (Let-
ter from Marx to Engels, dated June 24, 1865).

We do not know if this passage from Marx’s letter was used in

the recent bourgeois polemic against the Russian Revolution, since

146
according to the common view the Russian people are Asiatic and
not European (and furthermore, according to mainstream opinion,
that is why they have to endure a dictatorship!). This racial thesis, ab-
solutely inoffensive for authentic Marxism, is prejudicial to our con-
temporary Russians who follow in the footsteps of Stalin, and rely on
a racial, national and linguistic tradition rather than on the class bond
of the world proletariat.
In the Marxist sense, the fact that the Great Russians should be
classified as Mongolians rather than as Aryans (we should not forget
that famous phrase that Marx so often invokes: “Grattez le Russe,
et vous trouverez le Tartare”, “scratch a Russian and you will find
a Tartar”) is of fundamental importance with regard to the follow-
ing question: is it necessary to await the formation of a vast capital-
ist Slavic super-nation that would include the whole Russian terri-
tory, or would at least extend to the Urals, in order to conclude the
cycle in which the forces of the European working class must offer
themselves up to the cause of the formation of nations, so that once
this cycle is terminated the European revolution becomes possible?
Marx’s response was that the formation of modern nation states as
a premise for the workers revolution corresponds to an area that ex-
tends in the east as far as the eastern borders of Poland, and under
certain circumstances might include the Ukraine and Little Russia as
far as the Dnieper. This is the European area of the revolution, the
first one that must be addressed, and the cycle that served as the pre-
lude to the next cycle characterized by purely class-oriented action, is
the one that later came to an end in 1871.
We must not forget, in order to prevent ethnology from being
transformed into the sole determining factor, that peoples of the Mon-
golian stock, that is, of the Finnish race, form nations in Europe (Hun-
gary and Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) which, because they are
socially advanced, are within the European historical zone, and Marx-
ism had a favorable view during this period of their attempts to win

147
independence from the three regimes of the Holy Alliance.

14 The Wars of 1866 and 1870

As the Polish insurrection collapsed and this road by which the rev-
olution might be resumed was closed, just as it was closed in 1848,
Marx and Engels perceived that war between Austria and Prussia was
approaching. Italy would undoubtedly participate in this war as a re-
sult of the pressing problem of Venetian independence, while the po-
sition of Russia and France remained in doubt; it was clear that a new
period of upheaval was gathering momentum. Sedan would settle all
accounts, and the only enemy of the revolution would be the French
Empire, which would have to be defeated.
On April 10, 1866, Marx thought that it was the Russians who
wanted war, because they had concentrated troops on the Austrian
and Prussian frontiers, with the intention of taking advantage of the
situation and occupying the other two parts of Poland. This would
mean the end of the Hohenzollern regime, but the real objective was
to eventually descend upon revolutionary Berlin in order to support
the Hohenzollerns. Marx and Engels hoped that at the news of the
first military defeat Berlin would rise.
It was something new that, despite the fact that they opposed
Austria on the Venetian question, Marx and Engels nonetheless con-
sidered that an Austrian victory would be useful, with respect to its
effects on the anti-Prussian revolution.
As for Napoleon III, the latter was no less hostile towards the
proletarian cause than Alexander of Russia, and up to this point his
dream had been “to become the fourth member of the Holy Alliance”,
a dream that was now shattered.
After the outbreak of the war, the Council of the International
debated the situation on June 19, 1866, vigorously addressing the prob-

148
lem of nationalities.
“The French, very strongly represented, gave vent to their cordial
dislike for the Italians.” Marx revealed the fact that the French were at
bottom against the Italo-Prussian alliance and would have preferred
the victory of Austria. In this session, however, what was of greater
importance than taking a position was the theoretical question: “The
representatives of ‘jeune France’ (non-workers), by the way, trotted
out their view that any nationality and even nations are ‘des préjugés
surannés’ [outdated prejudices].” Here Marx drily commented: “Proud-
honised Stirnerianism.” (Stirner is the philosopher of extreme indi-
vidualism who, focusing everything on the subject’s “ego”, on the one
hand helped inform the theory of the super-dictator of Nietzsche, and
on the other, the theory that rejected the state and society, the basic
theory of the anarchists: both theories are the quintessence of bour-
geois thought. Proudhon on the economic and sociological terrain
glorified the small autonomous group of producers who exchanged
their products with the other groups.) Marx further clarified this con-
demnation, denouncing the retrograde nature of something that was
being passed off as radical. As we have already pointed out, the posi-
tion that Marx attacked did not involve the supersession of this his-
torically bourgeois, but operative, postulate of the nation, but rather
fell short of it.

“Everything to be broken down into small ‘groupes’ or

‘communes’, which in turn form an ‘association’, but not
a state. Furthermore, this ‘individualisation’ of mankind
and the mutualisme it entails are to proceed by bringing
history to a halt in every other country and the whole
world waits until the French are ready to carry out a so-
cial revolution. Then they will demonstrate the experi-
ment to us, and the rest of the world, being bowled over
by the force of their example [do you not get the impres-

149
 sion that he could be speaking of today’s Russians?], will
do the same. Just what Fourier expected from his pha-
lanstère modèle [today they would say the socialist fa-
therland, the country of socialism...]. D’ailleurs, every-
one who clutters up the ‘social’ question with the ‘su-
perstitions’ of the Old World is a ‘reactionary’.”

On this occasion Marx, ordinarily so reluctant to engage in pub-

lic activity, could not avoid speaking out against his future son-in-law
Lafargue. His speech caused the English to break out in laughter when
he pointed out that Lafargue, after abolishing nationality, had spoken
in French, a language unknown to most of those present: “I went on
to suggest that by his denial of nationalities he seemed quite uncon-
sciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation.”
What was Marx’s position on this war? First and foremost, he fa-
vored a Prussian defeat. And in the same letter to Engels, rather than
in an address to the Council (we must keep in mind the confiden-
tial nature of the writings that we are now quoting), he says: “For the
rest, the position is difficult now because one must equally oppose
the silly Italianism of the English, on the one hand, and the mistaken
polemic against it of the French, on the other, and above all prevent
any demonstration which would involve our Association in a one-
sided course.” Therefore, in the war of 1866, Marx did not openly take
the side of any of the belligerents, an attitude comparable to that of
the Poles during the anti-Russian insurrection.
After the Austrian victories in Italy, Austria was defeated at Sad-
owa by Prussia, and Napoleon intervened as a mediator. On July 7,
1866, Marx wrote: “Beside a great Prussian defeat, which perhaps (oh
but those Berliners!) might have led to a revolution, there could have
been no better outcome than their stupendous victory.” Marx thought
that the best interest of Bonaparte would have been served by an alter-
nation of victories and defeats between the Austrians and Prussians,

150
so that a strong Germany should not be formed with an overwhelm-
ing central hegemony, so that Bonaparte with his military force intact
would become the arbiter of Europe. Marx also thought that Italy’s
position was very dangerous and that Russia stood to gain no mat-
ter what happened. As everyone knows, Austria, accepting the me-
diation of France, surrendered Venice to France: in order to obtain
Venice, the King of Savoy had to once again engage in a rapproche-
ment with his former ally of 1859, who defiantly proclaimed his fa-
mous “jamais” to the occupation of Rome.
With this panorama the position of the International is precise:
the war will be unleashed by Bonaparte, who was equipping his in-
fantry with needle-guns, when he saw the opportunity to strike (Marx
in a letter dated July 7 considered the technological development of
weaponry as an application of economic determinism — “Is there any
sphere in which our theory that the organisation of labour is deter-
mined by the means of production is more dazzlingly vindicated than
in the industry for human slaughter?” — and suggested to Engels that
he should write a study on the topic; today it seems that everything is
reduced to the following question: who has the atomic bomb?). The
second point is that it is necessary for the France of Napoleon to be
defeated in this war.
We have continually insisted concerning the proletarian policy
with respect to a domestic and revolutionary war for national inde-
pendence, such as the Polish insurrection of 1863 (or the Italian upris-
ings of 1848 and 1860), in which case the position to take was unam-
biguous and total. We shall not repeat everything that has been said
about the war of 1870 between France and Prussia. The proclamations
of the International totally ruled out any support for either the gov-
ernment of Bismarck or that of Bonaparte: concerning this question
there is no doubt. But the International openly desired the defeat of
the Second Empire (just as in 1815 it would have preferred the victory
of the First Empire).

151
 In the Address of the General Council dated July 23, 1870, the
valiant opposition to the war demonstrated by the French sections
is applauded, but then this oft-used phrase appears: for the Germans
the war is a “war of defense” (which would later be the object of a
historically indomitable commentary by Lenin). This phrase was fol-
lowed by an open attack on Prussian policy and the invitation to the
German workers to fraternize with the French: the victory of Ger-
many would be a disaster and would reproduce “all the miseries that
befell Germany after her [so-called] wars of independence [against
Napoleon]”. It was necessary to wait for someone like Lenin to come
along and say: the philistine petty-bourgeois cannot understand how
one can desire the defeat of both belligerents! Beginning in 1870, the
general theory of proletarian defeatism was already in effect.
With the next quotation we shall see the historical evaluation of
Marxism concerning this phase of 1866 and 1870 and the role played
by the feudal powers of the East and by the bourgeois dictatorships of
the West (without forgetting that we have to discourage the use of the
word “if” in the story for all those cretins who seek to be published):
“If the battle of Sadowa had been lost instead of being won, French
battalions would have overrun Germany as the allies of Prussia.”
A defensive war means a war in the historically progressive sense,
and this was the case, as Lenin has maintained, between 1789 and 1871,
but never after that (we shall never tire of throwing this in the faces
of the just war advocates of 1939-1945). This means that if Moltke had
departed one day before Bazaine, and if the war cry had been: “To
Paris, To Paris!” instead of “To Berlin, To Berlin!” — the Marxist as-
sessment would have been the same.

152
15 The Commune and the New Cycle
The frustrated revolution of 1848 in Germany did not break out again
in 1866 or in 1871 due to the overwhelming victories of Prussian mil-
itarism. But the tremendous defeat of French militarism stimulated
the uprising of the proletariat of Paris, not only against the fallen regime
but against the entire republican bourgeois class that had capitulated
to the reactionary Prussian forces, and also against the Prussian forces
themselves. The fall of the revolutionary government of the Com-
mune in no way diminished the historical importance of the new cycle
which from that moment forward imposed on the European commu-
nists only one historical goal: the proletarian dictatorship.
The Second Address of the International dated September 9, 1870
appeared after the victory at Sedan and the surrender of the French
army, the expulsion of Napoleon and the proclamation of the Re-
public. This Address is a firm exhortation against the proposals to
annex Alsace and Lorraine, and against the claim that this annexation
was necessary to create a military security corridor; it scornfully noted
the lack of any similar Prussian concern for the Russian borders and
foresaw “a war with the Slavonic and Roman races”. In this text it is
also said that the German working class “have resolutely supported
the war, which it was not in their power to prevent”, but was now
calling for peace and for the recognition of the Republic proclaimed
in Paris. This claim aroused some serious doubts; the Parisian prole-
tariat, however, was advised not to revolt against this republic. The
Third Address, however, the personal work of Marx, not only con-
stitutes an expression of the politics of the proletariat, but is also a
historical pillar of the revolutionary theory and program. Marx read
it on May 30, 1871 — as Engels recalls in his Postscript to the 1891 edi-
tion — only two days after the last combatants of the Commune fell
in Belleville.
This classic source of revolutionary communism to which we must

153
incessantly refer, dispenses with the kinds of concerns that six months
before had led the General Council to advise the Paris proletariat not
to plunge into such an impossible enterprise because the resulting
catastrophe would favor more Prussian invasions and annexations,
causing the reemergence of another major problem of national inde-
pendence in the very heart of the most advanced part of Europe. The
International of the workers of the whole world united with all its
forces with the first revolutionary government of the working class
and took note of the lessons that the ferocious repression had trans-
mitted to the future history of the proletarian revolution.
These lessons have been betrayed twice on a world scale, in 1914
and 1939, but the goal of our patient reconstructions and of our tire-
less repetitions is to show that, despite these betrayals, these lessons
will be taken up again in a future historical period, just as they were
set forth in that memorable text.
The alliance of Versailles and the Prussians to crush the red Com-
mune, meaning that the former had assumed, under the pressure of
the latter and the orders of Bismarck, the role of executioner of the
revolution, leads to the historical conclusion that “the highest heroic
effort of which old society is still capable is national war [which up
until then we had to support]; and this is now proved to be a mere
governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and
to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil
war”.
Lenin did not invent the rule: transform the war between nations
into a civil war; he found it already written. Lenin did not say that
this slogan he proclaimed to the European proletarian parties in 1914
and 1915 should be modified in later situations, that the phase of al-
liances in favor of national wars would return, the phase of “peace ...
between the working men of France and the appropriators of their
produce”, as the text quoted above puts it. Marx and Lenin revealed
the historical law according to which, from 1871 until the destruction

154
of capitalism, there are two alternatives in Europe: either the prole-
tarians pursue defeatism in all wars, or, as Engels prophetically wrote
in the 1891 Postscript, and as we can see this prediction in effect to-
day, “. . . is there not every day hanging over our heads the Damocles’
sword of war, on the first day of which all the chartered covenants of
princes will be scattered like chaff; (...) a race war which will subject
the whole of Europe to devastation by 15 or 20 million armed men....”
(Postscript by Engels to the 1891 edition of Marx’s The Civil War in
France).
First: Marxism has always foreseen war between bourgeois states;
second: it has always admitted that in particular historical phases it
is not pacifism but war that accelerates general social development,
as was the case with the wars that enabled the bourgeoisie to form
national states; third: since 1871 Marxism has established that there is
only one way that the revolutionary proletariat can put an end to war:
with civil war and the destruction of capitalism.

16 The Imperialist Epoch and Irredentist

Residues
The survival, in the epoch of wars of independence and national for-
mation of a bourgeois revolutionary character, of a great number of
cases in which lesser nationalities are subjected to states of another
nationality in Europe itself, does not obviate the fact that the pro-
letarian International must reject any justification for war between
states for reasons of irredentism, unmasking the imperialist purposes
of every bourgeois war, and calling upon the workers to sabotage such
wars from both sides. The inability to put this into practice has de-
termined the destruction of revolutionary energies under the oppor-
tunist waves of the two wars, and will also determine the same out-
come in a future war if the masses do not abandon the opportunist

155
leadership in time (social democratic or kominformist), thus allowing
capitalism to survive its violent and bloody crises.
It was Lenin who showed, with reference to the war of 1914, that
the war broke out due to the economic rivalry between the major
capitalist states for the appropriation of shares of the productive re-
sources of the world and especially those of the colonies in the under-
developed continents. He never overlooked the existence of serious
national problems in various metropolitan states; the perfect example
is the Austrian monarchy which ruled over various Slavic, Latin and
Magyar regions, not to forget some Ottoman groups. Another exam-
ple was Russia, whose feudal state straddled the border between Eu-
rope and Asia. This is why, when considering Russian national ques-
tions, one cannot even reach a conclusion without keeping in mind
the purpose of this work and others that will follow, in which the dy-
namic of the class and national struggles on the non-European conti-
nents and between races of color will be addressed (the eastern ques-
tion; the colonial question).
The socialists of the Second International based their betrayal on
three sophisms. The first was to support the nation in case of defen-
sive war; the second was to support a war against a “less developed”
country; and the third was that the war of 1914 would resolve the
problems of irredentism. The difficulty posed by the irredentist issues
of the time was formidable: France, for example, wanted to recover
Alsace and Lorraine, but had no intention of surrendering Corsica or
Nice. England contributed its support, but did not declare the inde-
pendence of Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus. Three countries wanted to
liberate Poland, each in order to exercise its exclusive rule over that
country.
Furthermore, everyone knows that the best example of resistance
to the seduction of irredentism was provided by the Italian party; an
even more classical example was that of the Serbian party, which was
active in a nation that was surrounded by fellow Serbians who were

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subjects of other national powers, attacked by a much more power-
ful Austria, but which mounted a furious campaign against the mili-
tarism of Belgrade and the patriotic fever. Concerning the importance
of these national questions, we have set forth the basic theses in a se-
ries of “Threads of Time” published in 1950-1951, and here we shall
restrict ourselves to providing a brief summary.

1. The radical Marxists correctly combat the social democratic the-

sis of simple linguistic “cultural” autonomy within the unified
state in multi-national countries, advocating total autonomy
for the minority nationalities, but not as a bourgeois result or
one made possible by the bourgeoisie, but as the result of the
overthrow of the central state power, on the part of the prole-
tarians of its nationality.

2. Those formulas are bourgeois and counterrevolutionary which

advocate the liberation and equality of all nationalities, since
this is impossible under the capitalist regime. However, resis-
tance mounted against the state colossi of capitalism by the op-
pressed nationalities and the small “semi-colonial” powers or
small states under protectorates, are forces that contribute to
the downfall of capitalism.

3. Within the confines of the cycle in which the proletarian Inter-

national denies any support or contribution on the part of its
own organized political forces for wars between states, refusing
to accept that the involvement in such a war of an alliance of
despotic feudal states, or states that are less democratically orga-
nized than the others, should be a reason to fail to comply with
this historic international position, and everywhere adopts de-
featism for its own country, which does not obviate the fact
that in its historical analysis it can and must foresee the differ-
ent effects that can be expected from the events of a war.

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In other texts we have offered numerous examples: in the Russo-Turkish
war of 1877 in which the Franco-British democracies supported the
Russians, Marx openly sympathized with the Turks. In the Greco-
Turkish war of independence of 1899, without going so far as to vol-
unteer to fight like the anarchists and republicans, the left socialists
supported Greece, just as they sympathized with the revolution of
the Young Turks, and with the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian liber-
ation struggle against Ottoman rule in the Balkan wars of 1912. And
the same thing could be said of the Boer War against the English, a war
— like the Spanish-American War of 1898 — that had extra-European
impacts and was fought for imperialist purposes.
But these were only episodes that punctuated the great period of
calm that lasted from 1871 to 1914. Next came the world wars: every
proletarian party that has supported its state at war or its allies is a
traitor, and everywhere the tactic of revolutionary defeatism must be
applied. From this crystal-clear conclusion, however, one must not
deduce that the victory of one or another side will not make any dif-
ference with respect to a more advantageous development of events
from a revolutionary perspective.
Our position on this question is well-known. The victory of the
Western democracies and of America in the first and second world
wars has caused the chances for the communist revolution to recede
into the distant future, while a different outcome would have made it
more likely to take place sooner. The same thing must be said about
the American capitalist monster in a third world war, which could
very well take place within one or two decades.
The precondition for the triumph of the communist revolution
is the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie: more than just
a precondition, it is the revolution itself. But in the domain of war
between states, which, until it can be proven to be otherwise, has up
until now mobilized greater physical energies than the social war, rev-
olutionary preconditions can also be perceived: the two principal pre-

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conditions are catastrophes for Great Britain and the United States of
America, the gargantuan engines of the terrible historical inertia of
the capitalist system and mode of production.

17 A Formula for Trieste Offered to the

“Contingentists”
The position of the communists on the current conflict over Trieste
can be summarized in these basic points: since 1911 the position of the
Italian proletariat against the demands for national unity has been
clearly expressed; in the war for Trieste and Trentino in 1915 the social-
ists denied their support, and the groups that later formed the com-
munist party in Livorno in 1921 advocated sabotage of the national
war; after 1918 the proletariat of the region of Giulia of both races and
languages united firmly around revolutionary socialism and the party
of Livorno; the communist proletariat must show the same resolute
disdain for the nationalist policies of the governments of Rome and
Belgrade, and even more for the disingenuous and deceitful policies
of the kominformists.
Due to a strange coincidence this work is being written while an
unforeseen series of events has placed Trieste under the spotlight of
international politics. What do the communists have to say about the
Trieste Crisis?
The Communist Party of Italy formed in Livorno in 1921 clearly
demanded the most resolute opposition to the war that liberated Tri-
este and the Giulian and Trentine territories, because that party was
the heir of the groups that, rejecting the sacred union in the war and
the slogan of “neither support nor sabotage”, advocated Leninist de-
featism, proclaiming in May 1915 the (indefinite) general strike as a
last-ditch attempt to stop the mobilization, and spurring the old party

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into action during the whole course of the war and in the period after
the defeat at Caporetto.
Therefore, we do not want Trieste. But the proletarian and rev-
olutionary Trieste was ours, and the majority of its political sections,
the trade unions, and the cooperatives, including people who spoke
both Italian and Slovenian—it did not matter!—were members of
the communist party, which featured the glorious Lavoratore that was
published in the two languages with the same articles on theory, pro-
paganda and political and organization agitation. And in the com-
munist ranks, red Trieste was in the front line in the battle against
fascism, which was victorious only thanks to the help of the tricolor
carabineros.
All of this has nothing in common with the positions of today’s
so-called Italian communists, who yesterday advocated that Trieste
should pass into the hands of Tito because it would thus become part
of a socialist fatherland, and today proudly display a contemptible na-
tionalism by calling Tito “the executioner” par excellence.
The rivalry between the state of Belgrade and that of Rome, in the
context of the repugnant world diplomatic struggle, as is also the case
with the rivalry between the Italian parties with respect to the ques-
tion of how to resolve the problem of Trieste, proceeds in accordance
with the most superannuated nationalist formulas, and those who are
most prone to make a crude use of the ethno-linguistic and historical
sophisms are not the authentic bourgeoisie, but the “Marxists”, Tito
and Togliatti.
We are not concerned, and not only because of our slight numer-
ical force, with the usual question: what do you advocate in terms
of practice, just what do you propose? But for those Marxists with a
concrete and positivist bent to their politics, we shall treat them to a
formula that they have never really thought about. The problem of
dual nationality and dual languages is unfathomable, and is not re-
solved by writing speeches for Venetians and Slovenes in English or

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Serbo-Croatian.
In substance, the situation is that in the cities, organized in a bour-
geois way, the Latins prevail, while the Slavs, on the other hand, live in
isolated villages in the interior of the country and especially all along
the coast. The merchants, industrialists, industrial workers and pro-
fessionals are Italian; the rural landowners and peasants are Slavs. A
social difference that is presented as a national difference, and which
will disappear if the workers take over the industries and the peasants
expropriate their landlords, but which cannot be eliminated by draw-
ing lines on a map.
In the constitution of the USSR, gentlemen of the Botteghe Os-
cure/footnoteA reference to the headquarters of the Italian Commu-
nist Party, and in its imitation version in the People’s Republic of
Yugoslavia, Marxist gentlemen of Belgrade, the foundation of the al-
liance between workers and peasants was the following formula: one
representative for every one hundred workers, one for every one thou-
sand peasants.
Hold any plebiscite on any question you please (you took this for-
mula from Mussolini, your common enemy) with the rule that the
vote of the inhabitant of the city and small cities (those, for example,
with more than ten thousand inhabitants) will equal ten, and that of
the inhabitant of the small town and the countryside will equal one.
Then you will be able to extend the democratic vote to the entire area
situated between the borders of 1866 and those of 1918: then you can
grab Gorizia, Pola, Fiume and Zara.
But on all sides they have gulped down so much disgusting bour-
geois democracy that they bow down before the sacred dogma, which
makes the wealthy class laugh shamelessly, to see the sacred dogma re-
peated everywhere that each person’s vote has the same weight.
With an arithmetic like ours most people would be in favor of the
thesis that says, to hell with both of them!

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18 The European Revolution
Within the historical development of the social productive forces, Tri-
este is a point of convergence of economic factors that extend beyond
the frontiers of the states in question, and a crucial point of the mod-
ern industrial and communications apparatus: in any event, any inter-
ruption that takes place has a very negative impact on the operations
of exchange, which is the infrastructure of that great movement for
the formation of national units, which came to an end in the 19th cen-
tury. In the middle of the 20th century, there is only an international
future for Trieste, one that cannot be effectively found by way of po-
litical and commercial agreements between bourgeois forces, but only
in the European communist revolution, in which the workers of Tri-
este and the surrounding region will be one of the leading assault
forces.
At the high point of the first emergence of capitalism in Italy, one
of whose first political states was the Most Serene Republic of Venice,
it is indisputable that Venetian dependence on Trieste, an advanced
port and emporium of the Adriatic in the middle of a feudal and semi-
barbarous Europe, was historically very progressive.
When the opening up of the great maritime trade routes of the
Atlantic caused the downfall of Mediterranean capitalism, and the
world market was being created thanks to Spain, Portugal, Holland,
France and England, by way of the Atlantic trade routes, in Trieste
there was always the chance, due to geographical factors, that the new
mode of production would penetrate the interior of Central and East-
ern Europe, where the landed anti-industrial reactionaries seemed to
be so well entrenched, and had erected age-old obstacles to the new
human organization.
The policy of the far-flung Austrian Empire which connected the
Adriatic port with the nascent industrial centers of Germany, Hun-
gary and Bohemia, was nonetheless progressive compared to the bar-

162
riers erected by the Russians and the Turks, and enabled capitalism to
gradually spread.
For the return of full-scale industrialism to the Italian peninsula
and for its establishment in the Balkans, a positive factor was the one
that was being forged by its connection with the powerful German
economy, in the latter’s attempt to undermine Anglo-Saxon predom-
inance in the Mediterranean basin.
Since the defeat of the Axis, Trieste has always remained a leading
issue, and in order to more effectively arrange America’s colonization
of Europe and its other repugnant schemes, America has subjected
the city and its territory to a state of emergency.
All communist revolutionaries salute the proletariat of Trieste be-
cause over the whole period spanning various phases they have been
occupied and obscenely represented by the worst kinds of capitalism
and the most ferocious militarist nationalisms, celebrating their orgies
of cruelty, corruption and exploitation.
Because so many rapacious claws and so many representatives of
a shameless and brazen colonialism have concentrated in such a small
area, Trieste will not find a national solution from any side, regardless
of the language that is utilized to invoke it.
The solution can only be international: but just as it will not come
from summit meetings or conflicts between states, it will not come
from their democratic fornications, from the sordid unity of Euro-
pean servitude, either.
We do not forecast a national flag over the Castle of San Giusto,
but the coming of the European proletarian dictatorship, which will
not fail to find among a proletariat that has endured such painful ex-
periences, when the time comes, the most resolute combatants.

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